Sweet Discourses
by guardianofscrewingup
Summary: Amid many uncertainties, there are two things Jim and Claire know for sure about the cross country journey they're on: 1) they'll have to present a united front to help Blinky guide the group true, and 2) if the trolls don't stop squabbling, the three of them will turn this pilgrimage RIGHT BACK AROUND.
1. BRB

**A/N:** So this fic is meant to contain many things: shippy cuteness, lone trolldad and cub, Barbara Lake: extreme long distance momming champion, Jim turning into that gif of Troy from Community screaming "MY EMOTIONS! MY EMOTIONS!" slight cannibalistic creepiness (thanks, canon), slowly-building plot, and endless jokes about how terrible NJ is made by someone who actually grew up there.

It's also heavily about travel and the outdoors written by two people who've traveled cross country and love the outdoors.

Warnings for canon's usual cruelty to animals and the trolls dealing with the urge to chomp on some convenient bipedal protein sources like in the Dark Horse comic about their first journey cross country.

* * *

 **Sweet Discourses**

by Kate and Kira

* * *

 **Chapter 1: BRB**

* * *

 **Sequoia National Forest, California**

Claire plucked one of several fire hazards out of her hair. The dry, brown pine needles were sticking pretty badly in her increasingly greasy locks. She'd taken her armor off within minutes of emerging from the tunnels into the woods, but after a week in it, she still felt grimy despite the fresh, open air.

"Really, I feel you," she said idly to the drought-stricken forest, chin resting in her hand as she watched the sunset. "I need a shower about as much as you do."

A tree had fallen that day - right in front of the cave that led to the tunnels sheltering the trolls. It was the first sequoia she'd seen fallen, but not the first she'd heard in her exploration of Sequoia National Forest and its paths. There was no chance she could move it, and no one had answered her calls when she'd shouted through the narrow gap left between the roof of the cave and the massive trunk of the sequoia. Until Jim returned from his trip back into the tunnels to check on the trolls still travelling Northeast towards them, Claire was barred from the underground.

And barred from the small stream of freshwater they'd found there, where she'd intended to wash up in the heat of midday. She hadn't found running water outside of the cave. With the sun going down, and the heat going with it, she'd lost her chance for a shower that day.

That's what she got for peeking ahead on her own.

Oh well. No one was dead, and no one had complained about her human grime. There were far more serious things for all the trolls to worry about as they tried to make their way to the east coast.

Trollmarket's gyre had been intact after Gunmar's invasion, but barely. They'd scavenged what they could before moving on, but many tunnels were damaged or blocked and with the heartstone dead, there was no chance to open or repair them. The tunnels left had been mostly dangerous routes in need of renovation, and the gyre hadn't held up for all the travellers.

The gyre broke down completely 20 miles from the tunnel's end in Sequoia National Forest. The trolls that made it all the way awaited the others in the caverns at the forest's edge. Fortunately, 20 miles was easily within a day's walk for the trolls, who didn't tire quickly. Jim had taken the daylight hours to go back and meet them, while Claire had taken the daylight hours to scout ahead. It would take time for the whole population to rest up and recover from their battle with Gunmar, but it was time Claire could use to find them the safest, most tree-covered route northeast through the forests.

But even this close to sunset, the trolls were deep in the caves, busy with that rest and recovery, and Claire was stuck on the front porch until Jim came to find her after sunset.

That would be soon. The sequoias stood nearly black against the orange sky, the last gleam of pure sunlight glimmered at the edge of a trunk. Claire glanced back through the slot of peephole into the cave system. No more light fell inside the cave, but no familiar blue eyes peered out at her from the shadows yet. She sighed, brushed her unwashed hair out of her face again, and turned back to the setting sun to wait -.

"I wondered where you were."

Claire perked up at the familiar voice behind her, and at the sudden shaking of the tree beneath her. She spun around to see those familiar blue eyes after all.

The tree shook again as Jim tested its weight. "Did this just randomly fall?"

"They fall a lot these days. The rangers at the visitor center said drought and beetles are killing a lot of trees in the park."

"I've got it."

"Are you sure? You're still hurt."

"It's fine, it seems pretty light." Jim ducked out of view and Claire scrambled off the tree, stepping back to a safe distance. "You know," he added, voice muffled by the entire sequoia between them. "For a giant tree anyway."

Jim dug his fingers into the wood with such ease it made the tree look like it was made of butter. He hoisted the trunk from one corner of the cave, levering it up until he got a shoulder underneath, and then enough footing to slide the trunk across his back.

Claire would've been lying if she'd said watching Jim lift heavy things didn't make her heart go pitter pat just a little bit. It had been the same even before he was this strong. Watching him make his magical boy transformation into a knight for the first time and then kill an entire horde of goblins had left her feeling the same tingly awe. Lifting a whole sequoia - even just the top half of a sequoia - was a level up, and almost worth having to wait this long to see.

Jim pivoted the sequoia, teeth gritted with effort as he walked the trunk far enough from the cave that Claire wouldn't have trouble getting back inside. The crash of the landing tree when he dropped it shook the forest, and Jim shook the tension from the lift out of his shoulders.

When he was done, Claire stepped back up and put her arms around his waist, leaning happily into a hug. "I missed you today."

Jim looked down at Claire with a dopey look that she not only had come to expect, but had made an entire habit of basking in. He rested his hands on her back in a hug about as gently returned as he could safely give her while still in his armor.

"Sorry I was gone so long. Everyone got pretty cranky over the hike and Blinky needed some help keeping the peace. There was a lot of unnecessary shoving and tripping." He paused, staring into space with almost a battle-hardened look. "And hair-pulling. And taunting."

Claire giggled. "Fully grown trolls?" she feigned shock. "Resorting to taunting?"

"So many different voices shouting, 'I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you!'" Jim said, rolling his eyes. "So many more shouting 'Stay on your side!' Blinky and I had to tell them that if they didn't stop fighting we were going to turn this pilgrimage _right back around_."

"Well, if we do have to turn it around, it won't be because we ran out of routes," Claire said, eager to share her own day's work with Jim. While he'd been wrangling a bunch of cantankerous sentient rocks, she'd had the pleasure of a long ramble through the woods, and she wasn't upset about her progress. She stepped back from his hug and took his hand, pulling him along to her backpack and supplies. "Let me show you what I found today."

For a second his four-fingered hand curled entirely around hers, like an envelope. Claire squeezed his hand gently. It was the only unarmored section of his skin she was able to gently touch, apart from his face.

She pressed her lips together and looked at his amulet. "Any luck powering down today?" she asked, trying to make it sound light. As much as she liked hugging Jim under any circumstances, hugging armor 100% of the time was not an ideal - and it had to be even less ideal for him, to be sealed away in a tin can for as many days as he had by then.

Jim drew in a long shuddering breath, as if trying to calm himself down from a fresh wave of claustrophobic anxiety. He shook his head.

"I've tried concentrating on it, I've tried not thinking about it, but nothing's working." He touched the amulet with his five-fingered hand, his fingertips toying with the edges like he was resisting the urge to pluck it out with his fingernails. "Troll digestion must take longer than human digestion so this is a little less uncomfortable than it would be if I were stuck while human, but…" He swallowed thickly. "There's a part of my brain that keeps freaking out. Like, 'What if this is permanent? What if this is your skin now?' But it can't be, right?" He pulled his ungloved four-fingered hand from Claire's and looked at it. "The rest of my skin's tougher than it was but it's not stone like it is for the trolls."

"I'm sure it's not permanent," Claire said. "When you first got the amulet, did it work perfectly every time?" She was genuinely curious. She'd never really asked Jim how long it had taken him to get used to his new magic artifact.

"Oh heeeeck no," said Jim. He sat on a rock as Claire dragged her backpack over and dug inside. "In the beginning, it was a mess. It kept just reacting to my moods whether I wanted it to or not." He thought about it a moment as Claire pulled out her park maps. "I was the one that changed. It wasn't that I got less scared, but I got better at shoving it down and working past it. After that, it's like the amulet went 'Well, newbie, I guess I'll leave the choice whether or not to armor up in the middle of Spanish class because you're nervous about a presentation up to you.'"

"So it's just a matter of time now before you get adjusted again," said Claire, matter-of-factly, because the alternative was too hurtful to even consider being true. She squeezed his hand again. "Remember how long it took me to get good with the Shadow Staff?"

Jim raised an eyebrow.

"Weeks. You got good with it in like the few weeks I was stuck in the Darklands. _Weeks_."

"There was a lot of practicing you didn't see!" And also an incident of near-drowning in the crushing depths of the ocean that she didn't want to talk about because hearing about it probably wouldn't help him calm down. "Maybe I can help you work on it tonight? After we look over routes?"

"Yeah. Yeah, sure," he said, but rather than smile back down at her, Jim glanced off over the top of her head. "I'd, uh, appreciate the help."

Claire spread a park map open as she sat on the rock next to Jim. "I got a backcountry map from the ranger station. I think I'm on to a good route for everyone to take, at least until we leave Sequoia National and get into King's Canyon."

"Uh huh," Jim said distantly. Claire didn't look up from her map, so she didn't see his gaze still directed elsewhere, his eyes narrowing slowly.

"I mostly went east today, along this ridge. There are some really good shade trees. They're sort of close together for everyone else to move through, but they look like they lead all the way to these hills here. I'd like to do some more scouting, but I bet there are good shelter caves there."

"Yep. Scouting ahead," Jim said. He hadn't looked at the map once. "Good thinking."

"The trick is finding easy enough terrain to walk through that doesn't accidentally cross any trails where everyone will be seen. Not that I've seen many people," Claire said, looking up. "Just some backpackers who were all about as crusty as me -"

She looked up just in time to see Jim tense, collect himself, and launch past her into the underbrush. He was already out of sight by the time she turned around, only the rustling of bushes indicating he'd been there at all.

"Jim?" She stood up. "Jim! Where did you go?"

More crashing in the distance was the only response.

Claire dashed in the direction of the rustling. Jim was always hard to spot in the dim, his blue skin blending with anything moonlit, his dark armor blending with the shadows, but she'd gotten good at spotting movement. There, to her left, he stood up suddenly -

"Jim! What happened?"

Jim's head snapped around and he looked at her with a wide-eyed expression like a kid with a hand caught in the cookie jar. In his actual hands was a trembling, live rabbit, stretched out in his grip, kicking futilely, and wide-eyed with terror.

Claire frowned. "Uuh -"

"Uuuuh," Jim echoed, clearly unsure of how to explain himself. "Uuuuuh."

He looked at the rabbit, then at Claire again. "Are you...are you hungry?"

Claire wanted to say _kind of_. "Do you know how to kill and clean a bunny?" she inquired, pointedly.

Jim looked at the rabbit as if he were confused about how it had even gotten into his hands. "I - I wasn't thinking about the second part."

The thought of another evening of Fjord Bars for dinner sounded less good compared to a campfire-roasted rabbit, but Claire held fast. Neither of them knew how to roast a rabbit. "You should let the bunny go, Jim."

"Um." He seemed to have trouble with it, like he was fighting some deep urge or instinct.

"Unless _you're_ hungry," Claire added.

But even though she was trying to make it clear she understood, the idea of just eating a live rabbit in front of her clearly didn't sit well with him. "No, it can go. Uh. Get going there, little...little snack friend."

He gently put the rabbit down and it bolted off into the underbrush. Claire saw Jim tense against the urge to take off after it. He crouched down on all fours instead, looking faintly embarrassed, like a puppy caught doing something it wasn't supposed to do.

Most of the time, Jim still carried himself like a perfectly normal human. But he had these moments now - where he moved and postured more like an animal. It was strange for many reasons, but especially because the trolls could be wild, aggressive, and brutal, but they weren't all that animalistic. Most of them walked on two legs. Jim, however -

However Merlin had taken him apart and put him back together magically, he really had become something distinct from a troll or a human. Something distinct from a merging of the two, an entirely the new individual creature.

Something - someone who looked at Claire like he expected her to come at him waving a rolled up newspaper.

Claire strolled up instead and sat next to him, leaning against his arm. "But it was a nice almost-dinner," she said. "A nice thought for another day. When we've gone to a library with some really good field references."

She hoped he'd readjust, sit instead of crouching and let her snuggle up under his arm instead of leaning against it. Just because it was consistent work, reassuring Jim that his new existence wasn't offputting to her, didn't mean it was _hard_ work.

But Jim growled instead, low in his throat. Clearly not at her, but at himself.

"I don't know what I was thinking! Which is the whole problem! It's why I can't get the armor to power down. My brain won't do a single thing I want it to do and it keeps doing things I don't even understand. How can I calm my thoughts if I don't even understand what I'm thinking?"

He scrabbled at the amulet with his nails, suddenly unable to resist the urge to pick at it. He picked up a stick and pried at the amulet's edge, then tossed the stick away angrily when that did nothing.

"I just want to get this stupid thing _off_!"

The outburst was sudden and explosive, reminding Claire that even with New Jim accepting his friends' and mother's love and his place in the world, his new troll emotions were tumultuous. She reached out to touch his cheek. "Jim -"

He jerked away from her hand. "Sorry. I - I need some time alone. If you need anything, the others are right there in the tunnels."

Claire wanted to protest, but didn't even get his name out before Jim had bolted into the forest.

Frustration washed over her, initially. She'd had Alone Time all day. She'd been looking forward to Boyfriend Time. But, she reminded herself, Jim hadn't had Alone Time. He'd had 'Wrangling A Bunch of Trolls' time, and that had worn him down.

But did that mean Alone Time was what he _really_ needed just then? Claire got up and, just for practice, started following his trail by the disturbed underbrush he'd left. She'd catch up to him slowly enough to give him some alone time this way, but still be close if it seemed like he needed someone.

He'd said it himself. He didn't always know what he was thinking just then. And he'd run off alone to push his loved ones away before even though it wasn't what he really needed. She'd stay close just in case it turned out he needed less alone time than he thought.

Provided she could actually keep up.

* * *

Jim bounded through the forest. He didn't have much attention to spare for his surroundings, preoccupied as he was with the anxiety squirming in his chest.

Claire had shaken him out of his instant jump into 'it's wabbit season,' but he was disgusted with himself for falling into it in the first place. The jump had been so instantaneous from "calmly looking at maps" to "hunt, catch, _Feed The Girl_." He wasn't even hungry, but the urge demanded action.

He came to a stop in a clearing of trees next to a blackberry thicket. He scrabbled in the dirt for a stick and resumed prying at the amulet again, but the stick only broke against his armor. He summoned a glaive and picked with that instead.

"Come on, come on…"

The sharp edge didn't even penetrate a chink. Jim threw the glaive aside, into a tree where it lodged deep before evaporating into nothing.

He'd asked Merlin, earlier, how to make it power down, and even the wizard hadn't given him a helpful answer. Instead he'd just given Jim a vague shrug, a noise that sounded a little like "I'unno" and instruction to, as the modern youths say, 'Chill out.'

 _Useless._

"Would you please just turn off?!" he begged the amulet in frustration. " The only thing I'm in danger of right now is tearing a chunk of my own chest out with you!"

Somehow, threats of self-harm didn't get the amulet to detach. Jim groaned loud enough to send more rabbits running. The instinct to chase hit him again, overwhelming as a taste flooding his mouth. He'd already run five feet before he managed to stop himself. Panting, he sat back against a tree.

"I've tried deep breathing. I've tried prying you off. I've tried calming mantras. What is it going to take?" He slammed his fist into the ground, breaking a root. "What?! What is it going to take?!"

It didn't surprise him when the amulet gave no answer, and he slumped, defeated, against the tree.

"I _really_ need to go to the bathroom," he said to the amulet, nearly begging again.

That got no response either. He stood up, heaving in a long, deep breath.

"Calming walk through the woods it is," he said. "Calming walk - not chasing rabbits, not attempting to kill anything - I'm just gonna - gonna take the calmest walk a troll - human - _whatever_ \- has ever taken. Which will be easy," he muttered, as he stepped through the trail-less woods, "Since I'm the only one of those that's ever done _anything_."

So he walked on, with what he hoped was a jaunty but calming stroll.

He walked and walked as the sunset started to fade. The night air cooled rapidly, a slight breeze whistling along his neck, reminding him of how refreshing it would be if he could just feel the breeze on the rest of his skin again.

Claire spoke of his amulet powering down like it was inevitable, and thinking of it as inevitable was calming. Not "will I ever feel the breeze again, will I ever hug my girlfriend without feeling like I'm going to crush her again," but "one night, this breeze, not just on my neck."

That would be a relief. He'd never take the breeze for granted again. He'd never taken hugging Claire for granted once, but even so, he'd take that even less for granted now -

The line of thought was good. Jim felt his heartbeat slowing down. His breaths came smoother, he stopped instinctually scenting the air for danger or jumping at every noise. Soon it might be time to try powering down again -

He stepped into another clearing and nearly put his foot down on a black bear cub.

Several rolled around in the brush, wrestling in play. The one he'd almost stepped on ran away, into the pile of the others, and all three perked up to look at him. Jim stopped cold, unsure of what to do. The closest he'd have come to camping was having a sleepover with Toby in a tent in the backyard, eating s'mores made by his mother over the stove. He'd never seriously considered real camping things like "What to do if you meet a bear."

"Hi bears," he said conversationally. "Just...hanging out, I guess?" He squinted at the three cubs. "You're a little young to be alone. Where's your mo -"

A bellow behind him answered the question. Jim turned in time to dodge a claw swiping at his stomach and jumped back just in time to avoid the swipe, but he still stood between the sow and her cubs.

"Hey hey, there's no need to fight! I can get out of -"

The bear stood up on its hind legs and took a swipe closer to his face. Jim sprang up and grabbed the top of a shorter conifer, which swayed under his weight but kept him above the ground. The bear ran for the tree's trunk immediately to climb after him.

"Don't make me hurt you!" Jim begged. "I don't want to hit a single mother!"

Ultimately, there wasn't much of a chance _he'd_ be the one to come out of this scrap hurt, but the bear didn't seem aware of that. Jim looked around for another, taller tree to jump to, hoping the mother would just decide to ditch him and move her cubs elsewhere, but then -

"Jim? What's all that noise -"

Down between two shorter conifers, Claire unknowingly stumbled between the sow and her babies. The bear's attention jerked from Jim to Claire. She let go of the tree trunk and dropped toward the new threat -

The instinct was all-consuming again. There was Danger. Claire was near the Danger. Claire didn't have a weapon with which to channel her natural badassery against a bear. Therefore: _Run._

Jim dropped to the ground, scooped Claire up under his arm like a football and bolted at top speed through the trees. Nothing else existed but Claire's weight under his arm and the absolute drive to Usain Bolt her as far from the Danger as possible.

"Jim!" Claire's yelling put a dent in his monofocus. "What the heck, Jim!"

"BEAR!" he shouted. The bear had done as he'd done, and bolted after the running figure. He understood her instincts all too well, but what could he have done other than feed into it? Jim ran until he saw a tree that wasn't a sequoia and actually had some lower branches and took a flying leap at the first one he saw. Claire, not expecting it, screamed under his arm, but Jim hit the branch and stuck the grab, crushing her into his armored side. He looked down.

Below them, the bear stared up in bewilderment. She could climb, but the branch was several dozen feet above the ground, too high to be worth the chase, especially with her cubs left alone so far behind her.

" _Jim_ ," Claire said again, her voice strained, reminding him that she was still dangling over a high, high drop that, unlike him, she couldn't survive a fall from.

The sow turned and loped back into the brush, back to her babies. The threat abated - but somehow, that still wasn't enough for his racing panic.

Jim swung up enough momentum to release the branch and jump to another, then to a tree trunk, digging his fingers and heels in to slow his descent, leaving long scrapes in the bark all the way to the ground. He didn't stop when he reached the forest floor. Claire only had time to yelp before Jim transferred her from underarm into a bridal carry and took off with her again.

"Jim, you don't need to -"

But he was running as fast as he could with Claire pressed to his chest, desperate to put more distance between them and the bears. All he heard was the rush of the wind, the thunder of his own beating heart in his ears -

"Jim! _JIM_!"

The background noise rising above the wind and thunder slowly took shape as Claire, calling out to him.

"You don't need to run anymore. Jim!"

He finally slowed and came to a stop, putting her down, but he still crouched there, hovering over her protectively, clutching her in his arms. He panted raggedly, sniffing the air to make sure nothing dangerous was close.

"Jim, look at me. Jim, you need to calm down now."

Her words barely reached him. He could smell at least three things to be worried about, not overly close but still closer than comfort, but Claire, oblivious, had his face in her hands now -

"Jim, look at me!" she insisted. "Talk to me, please. We've been out of danger for like, a full _minute_."

Jim finally looked Claire in the eye. The sight of her, still unhurt, broke a chunk out of his panic.

"Jim, I'm sorry," Claire said. "I didn't see the bear -"

A few deep breaths brought him further back. Back enough to remember that he'd been so calm just a few minutes ago, calmer than he'd been in weeks, and yet, seconds later he was halfway up a giant tree, panicked, having panicked his girlfriend, and had almost punched a single mom.

He backed out of Claire's touch, groaning, clutching his forehead and scraping his nails against his horns.

"Jim," Claire said. "Talk to me. Come on."

He just groaned again, too conscious suddenly of the armor that was still there. Might always be there.

Not getting a response was as much of a response as Claire needed. "Okay, Anxious Jim," she said, trying to catch his wandering eye again. "You're not split into ten of you right now but I can tell who's driving. Take some deep breaths until I can speak to Crispy Jim, will you?"

The small snort of laughter was the first noise she'd heard from him since stumbling on the bears that sounded a little more human and a little less wild. But he couldn't keep it up. The joke passed and Jim let out a little whine, all the discomfort and frustrating taking his senses over now that panic and adrenaline were fading. He slumped to his knees, burying his face in his hands.

Claire knelt next to him to embrace him. At her touch on his cheek, Jim leaned into her, trying to bury his face in the small space of her shoulder, his clunky horns getting in the way. Claire leaned her cheek against his forehead, resting one hand in his hair.

"It's okay," she said. "You acted so fast. You always do. You were always so quick to react when something put us in danger, and now you're even faster - that's a good reason to feel _more_ in control, not anxious -"

Jim finally found his words. "My brain is - is - it's like it's _primed_ to react to danger. It's all live circuits, even when I want it to calm down, it just won't - I'm always ready to hunt, or fight, even when I don't want to do either -"

"You'll get there," Claire soothed. "One day you'll remember when this used to be difficult -"

"When?!"

It burst out not as a question, more as a demand. Not of Claire, but in general. It wasn't her fault that he was impatient with the world, with himself. Jim pulled away from her abruptly, suddenly on his feet again, agitated and pacing. "Claire, I _almost_ had it!"

"Had wh -"

"I almost - had - it - off - and then!"

And then the bears.

He let out a loud cry that trailed into a rumbling snarl of frustration, punched a nearby tree and -

Well, it must have been one of the ones that'd suffered from the drought, because the roots ripped right out of the ground. The tree, all hundred feet of it, toppled, ripping branches from other trees, then slamming other trees, crashing in a long, long torrent of noise that shook the forest even after the tree had settled.

Jim felt stupid. It had to be a huge environmental nono to go around punching the wilderness until it broke. His heart pounded out of control even as his shoulders dropped. He didn't look back at Claire. He didn't want to see her looking at him like a toddler having a tantrum - or worse, looking at him with actual fear.

But then she spoke behind him, softly, and he heard it even past his ragged breathing and the pounding in his ears.

"Some say the lark makes sweet division. This doth not so, for she divideth us. Some say the lark and loathèd toad changed eyes. O, now I would they had changed voices too, since arm from arm that voice doth us affray, hunting thee hence with hunt's-up to the day. O, now begone. More light and light it grows."

The new fluttering feeling in Jim's chest was softer and warmer than anxiety, but he still didn't trust himself to talk.

Into Jim's silence, Claire continued, "And then you say 'More light and light, more dark and dark our woes.' And the nurse says 'Madam.' And I say 'Nurse.' And then she says, 'Your lady mother is coming to your chamber. The day is broke; be wary; look about,' because she's really supportive and Juliet should appreciate her more. And I say, 'Then, window, let day in, and let life out!'"

Jim stood quiet for a little longer, took a deep breath, and said, "Farewell, farewell. One kiss and I'll descend."

He turned a fraction, but didn't lean to kiss Claire. Instead, she walked up and stepped on the jagged tree stump to peck him on the cheek. Jim smiled in spite of himself. Claire took him by the hand, gently wheeling him around to face her, and led him over to another fallen tree. She pulled him down to sit next to her.

"Art thou gone so?" She kept her eyes on his, holding him with her gaze. "Love, lord, ay husband, friend! I must hear from thee every day in the hour, for in a minute there are many days. O, by this count I shall be much in years ere I again behold my Romeo!"

His brain had to dig for all the lines. Memorizing them to begin with had been hard enough work, and the play had been months ago. But the work it took was helping him now. Focusing on the lines left his brain less power to focus on new waves of anxiety.

"Farewell," he recited, feeling the pounding of his heart wind down. "I will omit no opportunity that may convey my greetings, love, to thee."

"O, think'st thou we shall ever meet again?"

A reluctant smile curled the corners of Jim's mouth. "Okay, now that you're letting me have _my_ line..." he said, slightly sarcastic, "I doubt it not; and all these woes shall serve for sweet discourses in our times to come."

Claire smiled back, at the tension leaving his voice. "O God, I have an ill-divining soul! Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low, as one dead in the bottom of a tomb. Either my eyesight fails or thou lookest pale."

"And trust me, love, in my eye so do you. Dry sorrow drinks our blood. Adieu, adieu." Jim's voice fell to a hush.

"O Fortune, Fortune, all men call thee fickle. If thou art fickle, what dost thou with him that is renowned for faith? Be fickle, Fortune, for then I hope thou wilt not keep him long." Claire reached up and cupped his cheek with a small, gentle hand. He leaned, reflexively, into her touch. "But send him back."

Jim covered Claire's hand with his. For a second he just took a breath - a normal, non-anxious, non-rushed breath - pressing her hand into his cheek.

"Good call," he said, with a soft smile. "Thanks, Claire."

His heart had slowed, and so had his breathing, in that space of having something that wasn't life, death, or the perpetual weight of the armor to focus on.

"Anytime," Claire said, drawing her thumb lightly along his cheekbone.

"I wish it didn't have to _be_ anytime," Jim admitted. "But I, uh, may take you up on that. If this last week is any indication."

"I'll be here," Claire assured him. "Trust me. There's nowhere I'd rather be than here."

"Here running lines I'm terrible at remembering for a play we won't perform again, in the middle of the woods?"

"Than with you."

With another breath, Jim leaned in, his forehead pressed against Claire's. She took his hand as he curled his fingers around hers, and closed her eyes with a sigh as she returned the gentle pressure.

They sat quiet in the waning light, the only sounds the breeze in the sequoias, their own breathing, the occasional rustle of a massive pine cone dropping to the needles on the forest floor. And then…

The quiet clink as the amulet dropped from Jim's chest into his hand. The armor evaporated and faded with its usual faint glow.

That was when most of Jim's clothes fell off.

Fortunately it was only _most_ , so the armor didn't suddenly reappear fueled by a rush of mortified embarrassment, but Jim still drew back with an alarmed exclamation, while Claire's relieved sigh turned into a high pitched giggle.

Merlin's stupid potion hadn't done anything at all to change his clothes. All the running around had ripped just about everything his transformation hadn't. The remains of Jim's shoes fell off the second he lifted his feet, and he quickly examined _which_ seams his pants had split at. Relief flooded him as he realized he still had the basic vestiges of modesty - _only_ the basics - and was left with fashion stylings befitting the Infraggable Krunk. His shirt was shredded -

Ho-ly crap, _he_ was shredded. Jim pulled aside a few scraps of fabric. He was possibly more shredded than his shirt.

"I have abs now!" For half a second he was just… going to look at the bright side of things. "Does this count as a 6 pack or an 8 pack? I never understood how that actually worked. Do the very bottom muscles counts as abs or are they something separate?"

Claire, unblinking, lifted her hand to her chin in thoughtful observation of said abs. "I don't know. I don't have an answer to this question yet. I think this question deserves very careful deliberation."

"Yeah about that." Jim did not give her the time, pocketing his amulet in the one pocket left miraculously intact, rolling off the tree and bounding into the woods. "I'm sorry but there's something I've been, uh, needing to do! Be right back!"

He left Claire behind, sitting and waiting patiently, considering - with what looked like satisfaction - the new question whether her boyfriend had a 6-pack or an 8-pack.

Jim leaped into the woods at Claire's back, sniffing for the nearest water source, to take care of some long-delayed business that had desperately needed to be taken care of for too long.

When he eventually came back, his hands were still wet from lack of intact cloth to wipe them on. He shook them out in the dry air, waiting for the stream water to evaporate.

"Sorry, I, uh, I had to go to the bathroom. Badly. And find a stream to wash my hands in."

Claire giggled again as she looked over her shoulder. "I figured. Did everything -" her eyes suddenly widened, trained on something just over Jim's shoulder. She pointed, more with bewilderment than panic. "Behind you -"

"What?" Jim whirled, and saw nothing. He spun back. "What's behind me?"

He felt it, now, an alien sensation of something at his back, a whisper by his ear as he whirled -

Claire pointed furiously. "Holy shish kebab! Look! Look!"

"What are you talking aboAAAUUUGGH!" Jim turned just in time to see -

Well, it wasn't the worst thing that he could have seen, but he certainly wasn't expecting to see it.

"I HAVE A TAIL!"

Jim grabbed the tail, then dropped it as he felt himself grab it. The shock of sensation in a whole new limb was as weird as the feeling of grabbing something's tail at all, even if it was his own. Jim grabbed the tail again. "Why do I have a tail, Claire?!"

Claire shrugged helplessly. "Some trolls have them? I guess you're half the kind of troll that does?"

Jim examined his tail. It was thinner, more flexible than any other troll's tail he'd seen, with a blue tuft of fur on the tip that matched the rest of his hair. "Other trolls' tails are stubby!"

"It's not really that long."

"It's too long by virtue of existing _at all_!"

"Maybe it's a mammal thing?" Claire suggested. "Merlin had to make you into a half-troll by cramming a bunch of...parts together. Maybe it's a troll tail the human way?"

"I felt something uncomfortable crammed in my armor while I was fighting but I thought it was just torn up clothing. But this?" Jim gestured at Claire, holding his tail out to her for observation. "This is crazytown banana pants!"

Toby wasn't here to say it, so Jim had to say it for him. He groaned in anxious frustration and clawed the dangling shreds off his remaining Krunk pants to make sure there weren't any other surprises. The shreds of his shirt and sweater, he did away with entirely. There wasn't anything left to salvage of either.

"Okay. Okay," he said, taking a few deep breaths, and calming down as he got a full picture of his new self. "No other surprises. Nine fingers, nine toes. A tail, because I guess that's a thing now." He paused, nine fingers tracing lines of welts all over his body. "And these."

The lines looked almost like…

"Those look like the etchings in your armor," said Claire, standing up from the log to come take a closer look. "Where it glows."

"Yeah, I figured these would be here. When Morgana hit me with her magic, it felt like..." He tried to find the words. "Aside from feeling like a sucker punch, it felt like electricity heating up my armor. I think it conducted the magic a certain way as it absorbed the attack. Maybe it's like how people who get hit by lightning sometimes get burns in the places where they were wearing jewelry."

"Those are your burns?" Claire asked gently. "Well...if they scar, it just means you'll look like Blinky and the others, right?"

"Yeah," Jim said softly. He liked the sound of that. If he had to have scars, ones that made him fit in with the other trolls weren't the worst. "Yeah, I guess I will."

He looked again at the remaining shreds of his pants, and frowned. "How far are we from the nearest Bulk-mart?"

"Pretty far," Claire said.

"Uhhhh." Jim considered the handful of shreds that had once been his sweater. "That's...going to make getting new clothes difficult, isn't it."

"Are you cold?" Claire asked.

"No. I don't get cold or hot as easily as before."

"Then it's okay," Claire said, soothingly.

"But...this is a problem."

"Or maybe it's the opposite of a problem."

Jim was about to ask her to explain her logic, before suddenly realizing there was probably no logic behind it.

Claire's eyes flicked from his - 6 pack? 8-pack? Whatever it was, back to his face, with her lips pressed together in a smile that looked like she was having to work very hard to keep her words in.

"...How opposite of a problem is it?" Jim asked, and he couldn't stop himself from smiling.

Claire let a small giggle escape.

"Greater freedom of movement isn't a bad thing," she said, a perfectly logical answer. Then she gave the perfectly non-logical one, "And let's just say that when I decided to run away with you I was expecting a lot of scenic views. That's the whole point of traveling, right?"

"Are you sure you're not possessed again?"

"Nope."

"Brain-swapped with Mary Wang?"

"Just take the compliment, Jim. It won't kill you. I don't have to be brainswapped with Mary to think my boyfriend's hot. You may have changed but that hasn't. Now come here." She opened her arms, and stepped up on a root, putting herself closer to Jim's shoulder-level. "I get the first hug without armor."

Jim couldn't stop himself from sighing in relief as she wrapped her arms around him. Claire was gentle, avoiding his raw magic burns, and her cheek was warm when she rested her face in his neck. He wrapped his arms around her too, resting his chin on the top of her head, and hugged her as tightly as he could without it hurting too much. She tightened her grip to match.

The worst part about being stuck in the armor hadn't been the claustrophobia, it'd been the lack of touch. He was a pretty affectionate person to be so suddenly cut off from hugs or touches from his mom and from Claire, and even from Blinky and Tobes had been almost painful.

They hugged for a solid minute. Behind Jim came a _thwip, thwip_ of movement as his tail flicked around happily, unconsciously, like the stupid thing had a mind of its own.

It was nice. The way she saw him. The way she didn't talk about his new form as if it were better or worse, the way she just … liked him in either shape. It was nice not to have to miss the way she saw him, when he was still - on some level - missing the way he'd seen himself.

"We should go back to the others," Jim said, at one point.

"Eventually," said Claire. She didn't undo her embrace.

"Right," Jim said, still hugging her back. "Eventually."

It wouldn't kill their traveling companions if he and Claire hugged for five minutes straight.

* * *

The next evening, Barbara Lake sat around her dining room table with the Domzalskis, Nunezes, Arrrgh, and takeout.

Barbara had made it very clear Toby was welcome around the house almost any time, He'd already taken her up on that offer multiple times in the week Jim and Claire had been gone, but only as often as Barbara promised that she wasn't going to be the one doing the cooking.

A few times he'd stopped by to talk about Jim with someone that missed him just as much. A few of the other times, it seemed like he was checking up on her at Jim's request, and doing it entirely without subtlety. Far be it from trying to avoid places he and Jim spent time together, Toby seemed to take comfort in occasionally swinging by. Tonight, he'd brought his Nana and Arrrgh in tow.

The Nunezes had come over for similar reasons. They missed their daughter, and Barbara thought it was a good idea for all of them to take some comfort in each other's company.

That comfort was taking the form of listening to Toby's stories about adventures he'd had with Claire or Jim, or heard about from them. One such story that Jim had relayed to Toby was a very familiar one, when Toby retold it to the Nunezes. At the time, Jim's odd behavior had alarmed them, but with Toby's explanation of what really happened, that incident had suddenly become a lot more funny than alarming.

So they spent the rest of the evening regaling the others on their version of events.

"- and each time I turn around, somehow he's acting stranger," laughed Javier, wiping a tear from his eyes. "One minute he's charming the teachers and swanning around the backyard on his tip toes, another time he's cowering under a picnic table! And each time with a different sweater. I'm starting to think this kid has to be on something, especially after trashing our house. Clearly, it's time to get the shotgun."

"Each time he's popping up and being the center of attention, Claire runs up looking like she's about to tear out her own hair, and drags him off, like a game of boyfriend whack-a-mole!" said Ophelia. "She must have been stashing them all in her room! I guess all she could think to do was just round up all her Jims and hide them in her room like she was a squirrel storing them for winter."

"Multiple boyfriends in her room, spontaneously multiplying," continued Javier, pouring his wife more wine. "The waking nightmare of the parents of any teenage girl, _trust me_."

"So I get up to give my speech to the teacher's union," Ophelia went on. "You know, the usual, about making the city safer. He pops up _again_ , this time in a _green_ cardigan and starts talking like Colonel Discomfort from Empty Steel Magazine, about how he won't be the hero the city needs, but the hero it really deserves, one who will make the tough choices. Then he says he's going to run for Council instead."

"Ophelia was about to lose it, I can tell she's about to blow her top, and I know I should be saying something to the kid or telling Claire he's got to go, but I'm standing there holding Enrique and at this point, the only thing I can think to say is -" Javier paused for a moment for timing "- 'Just how many different colors of the same cardigan do you _own_ '? How many did you bring to this barbecue? _Where are you stashing them all_?"

Barbara wiped tears from her eyes. Nana Domzalski laughed her bubbly little chortle, Arrrgh! smiled, and Toby hung on Javier and Ophelia's every word, enthralled by the details that Jim had been too embarrassed to tell him.

"Barbara, even if it was just one small part of him that was charming the teachers, if this whole being-their-champion thing gets boring for him, you should tell Jim to look into whatever it is that passes for troll politics." Ophelia looked to Arrrgh. "Do your people have politics?"

"...Ticks?" clarified Arrrgh, confused. "We have ticks. Very big. Eat magic."

"What, like, you have them right now?" Toby asked, edging away slightly.

Arrrgh's explanation was cut off by Barbara's phone, ringing with the tone she'd set up just for Jim's texts.

"Oh, that's Jim!" She quickly pulled out her phone. "He says, 'Hi Mom, making good progress, everyone's doing okay. We're at a gap in the tunnels but Claire was amazing as usual and got us information and maps from the visitor center. We'll ask if we need any help. Also, look what I did!'" Barbara frowned. "'Look what I did?' Oh, wait, he's sending something else -"

Up popped a selfie of Jim and Claire. Claire's face was smudged with dirt and her clothes showed the wear of a week of travel. Jim wore a Sequoia National Park zip d-up hoodie, in what was probably Men's XXXL and a beaming smile.

"He powered down the armor!" Barbara gasped. "Finally. He was having trouble, I was getting so worried."

"He did?" Toby stood on a chair to see over her shoulder, then to take her phone. "He did! And Claire bought him a hoodie. That's a good color on him. Look, Nana, it brings out his fangs."

Nana adjusted her glasses at the screen before her. "Oh, I see. Very handsome!"

"Good color," Arrrgh agreed, gently tapping the screen.

"'PS I guess I have a tail now,'" Toby read. "Um. Okay. Well. He didn't send a picture of that."

Councilwoman Nunez was busy looking at her own phone, which was blowing up with similar texts from Claire. "Claire says the hoodie was expensive." She looked meaningfully at her husband.

Javier sighed and took out his own phone. "I'll log into Pay-pal."

"I'll pay you back, Javier," said Barbara, "let me get my checkbook. "

"Those tourist trap gifts shops do drive up the dollar," Toby observed, sagely


	2. He Made it Weird

**Chapter 2: He Made It Weird**

* * *

 **Yosemite National Park, California**

"Lift, Jim! Lift with your butt!" said Toby.

"I'm lifting!"

"With your butt!"

"That's implied!"

In the years the trolls had lived under Arcadia Oaks, most mountain tunnels through the Sierras had fallen into a disarray impossible to pass. With the southwest and its open desert scrub out of the question, the group made its way north toward the cloudy Pacific Northwest forests. They intended to skirt barren Nevada and reach decently forested Midwestern states, like Missouri.

They'd taken advantage of a rest stop in Yosemite. The park's bear-proof dumpsters weren't troll-proof due, in some cases due to their massive strength, in other, smarter cases, due to their opposable thumbs. So they had plentiful garbage to eat. The occasional deer and squirrel rounded their diets out. The trolls, denied cats, had gone after small rodents with relish.

Since their route was restricted to wilderness, they'd traveled a long time without phone reception before reaching Yosemite, so Jim and Toby had a lot to catch up on (after Jim caught up on video chatting with his mother).

"A lot to catch up on" meant, for Toby, addressing a pressing question that required immediate experimentation: Could Jim's tail carry another weapon? Could he _triple wield_?

Since the armor closed over Jim's tail and pressed it securely against his back, it couldn't lift Daylight or his glaives. But Jim had found a few sticks of similar weight to experiment with. If the third limb could be useful, he'd ask Merlin to alter the armor to allow his tail to stick out.

This was turning out to be a pretty big "if."

"I don't know, Tobes," Jim said, holding the phone over his shoulder so Toby could see his tail wrapped firmly around the stick, but trembling from backbone to tip as he struggled to lift it. "I can grab on okay, but it's hard to control. I don't think it's strong enough to lift a real weapon."

"It's a brand new body part that you've never exercised before, of _course_ it's not strong," Toby pointed out, clearly too enthusiastic about the idea of triple-wielding to let this 'hold a knife in your tail' thing go. "At a time like this, Jim, you have to ask yourself - and I can't believe I'm saying this -" Toby sighed a long, long sigh at the deep irony of what he was about to ask his best friend. " _What would Coach Lawrence say_? "

"I'm pretty sure Coach Lawrence would yell like he does at you about climbing ropes, and I'd follow your inspirational example by ignoring him."

"Hang on I can make this more motivational." Toby disappeared from the screen for a moment. In a second he was back, upper lip bedecked with the largest, fakest moustache Jim had ever seen. He cleared his throat and yelled, "LAKE! I'VE SEEN STRONGER TAILS ON TOBY'S NANA'S CATS! GIVE ME TWO MORE REPS!"

"I'm not doing butt reps."

"That's quitter talk from someone who clearly doesn't want to triple-wield."

" _I'm not doing butt reps._ "

"Fine." Toby crossed his arms. "Go ahead and let us tailless bipeds all down, shirk your wizard-given gift. It's your butt."

Jim rolled his eyes and tossed the stick away, rubbing his sore tail muscles. Touching it still felt strange, like a reverse phantom limb - something that shouldn't have been there even though he felt it, but still was there every time he touched it.

Still, he was getting used to it. Finally. All it had taken was time, and, when Jim was honest with himself, Claire gently petting it one night as they fell asleep in one of their lean-tos.

Claire's tent had proven too small for Jim's new height, and too shreddable for his horns, when he woke up abruptly one morning and wrecked the entire tent. They'd resorted to, and perfected, the art of the lean-to, combining Claire's duct-tape repaired bug netting with a blue tarp for waterproofing. They slept on camp mats with sleeping bags - one for Claire, two for Jim zipped together. It had been raining. His tail snaked through a gap in the sleeping bags, and Claire pulled it over her stomach, idly petting the tuft of fur at the end the way she gently held his hand or stroked his arms. The rain and her gentle touch had lulled Jim to the deepest, most relaxing sleep he'd had in months.

After that the tail had felt more... _his_ somehow. But getting used to something wasn't the same as it being _useful_. A lot of Jim's new changes _weren't_ useful, they just... _were_. He was getting used to _that_ , too, that not everything about his new existence had a purpose.

"Keeping the tail out of the armor might be a bad idea anyway. Nomura grabbed it during some armorless training once and threw me t _hrough_ a tree. And another limb is another thing for someone to chop off in a fight. I like having all my limbs intact - including the weird new one."

"I'm just saying, if I had a third prehensile appendage I'd be using it for everything. I'd be unnecessarily using it at all times."

"Hey, I never said I wouldn't be abusing my new tail-related power. It's handy, even if it has a mind of its own."

"Wait, a mind of its -?" Toby interrupted.

"All I'm saying -" said Jim, powering past having to admit that sometimes his tail...wrapped itself around his girlfriend's waist like he had no say in the matter on account of she smelled so good. "- is maybe it's not a good idea to flail a sword around in my tail if _all_ I'm doing is flailing."

To prove he wasn't above using it for pretty much everything else, Jim picked up the thermos of coffee he'd left on a stump nearby up with his tail and drew the thermos up to his hand. (It turned out undoctored dark-as-night black tar coffee was still somewhat tasty, so he drank it whenever he could.)

"As new changes go, at least the tail's _fun_. Most of the rest..."

He trailed off, not sure how to explain.

"The rest of what?" Toby downshifted as Jim trailed off. "Keep talking, buddy."

Jim smiled a little. God, he'd missed this. Claire was easy to talk to, but he felt wrong dumping all his problems on her. She worked so hard at creating their route, using her freedom to interact with humans in the sun to help them. And Blinky had to keep everyone organized and happy. It felt wrong to lay his troubles on everyone else when they were working so hard, especially since, for once, he...kind of wasn't.

Nothing had attacked them so far. Nothing pursued them. All he had to do was keep up his training and...figure his own stuff out.

"The rest of _everything_. Tobes, I know everyone thinks I'm still the same as I was on the inside, but my brain isn't the same. Everything just...feels more intense," Jim explained, relieved at having a place to unload. "If I'm sad, I'm hysterical; if I'm happy, I'm so happy I'm going to explode; if I'm embarrassed I want to hide in a hole forever -"

"That last one sounds the same as before."

"No, Tobes. It's worse! It's actually worse! Before, when I looked like a _total_ moron, I'd want to stay in a hole for a day or two, a week at most. Now, I want to _live_ in the hole, even for little things. I want to pick out curtains and put down a down payment for a mortgage. It's like I feel the same things as before, but now they take over my whole brain, like I'm...I'm feeling enough for _two_ people. It's fine when I'm happy but when I'm anything else..."

Toby nodded through Jim's explanation. "When you talked to Merlin about it, did he do anything other than shrug and go -" he shrugged, and made an "I'unno" sound.

Guessing that Jim had talked to Merlin already - and that Merlin had been mostly unhelpful - was an easy assumption to make.

"Nope," Jim said with a rumbling snort of frustration. "Merlin's all shrugging and uselessness. I've had to figure it out on my own."

"Has it gotten any better since you first changed? You got the amulet to power down -"

"Well, there's all these weird new instincts, too, stuff that isn't troll _or_ human. And I don't think it's something that _will_ get better, it just...is what it is." Jim went quiet and drew a deep breath through his nose. "I used to know who I was. Back before I changed. Maybe I doubted myself sometimes, maybe I didn't always like every little part of myself - the parts that lied to my mom or let people down - but I liked a lot of me. At least I could see my good and bad for what it - what I was. Now everything's changed so much I don't know who I am anymore."

"Everyone changes, Jim. Everyone has to figure out who they are after they change. Claire and I changed a lot this last year too. Not as much as you, but I mean -" Toby grasped for examples. "Look at _Steve_."

Of all the people to have changed, and change extremely, only Jim had outstripped Steve.

" _E_ v _erybody_ changed." Toby pointed out. "You, Strickler, Nomura - you're just the champion overachiever who changed _the hardest_. Whatever challenges that comes with, everybody who knows you knows you can handle them. Maybe not right away, but you can."

"I...I never thought about it that way."

Toby was right. Everyone _had_ changed, even if Jim had changed the most. And that meant adjusting and figuring himself out was just...a normal thing to do. He'd have to work harder than most to do it, but having to work harder than everyone else just came with the amulet.

His transformation had been unnatural but if changing was a normal thing, then adjusting was normal, too. Jim smiled at his best friend through his phone.

"Man, I missed you, Tobes. I'd be even more of a mess without Claire and Blinky - even Nomura and Not-Enrique _try_ , but I miss having you here. I hate that we keep going places where phone reception is so shoddy."

"I know, I know, I'm your anchor," Toby said, face contorting in a picture of sadness. "Your _rock_. I'll always be tethering you somewhere less terrible than -" He shuddered, deep and soul-wracking. "- _New Jersey_." He paused, joking tone fading. "Really, I miss you, too, Jimbo."

"I have to work being a champion of change into being a champion at being comfortable in my own skin. My new skin." Jim gestured to his hoodie-clad, unnecessarily tall form. "I don't know how you do it, but you're pretty much a natural at being comfortable in your skin."

"Uhhh," Toby dragged the syllable out, as if waiting for Jim to make a connection. "I don't know about _natural_ at that."

"No, really," Jim said, trying for encouragement. "You're always so confident. I didn't notice how comfortable that makes everyone else until I wasn't around you anymore, but people can definitely feel it -"

"Jim, I'm a fat kid," Toby pointed out, raising his eyebrows, tone and expression conveying as much 'duh' as possible. "People never let me forget it."

"Oh," Jim said, the ball dropping in the back of his mind.

"Yeah, _oh_ ," Toby echoed. "Being confident isn't natural for me, it's the result of years of practice. Remember when I moved to town, how excited I was? I was excited to live in a town where my nickname wasn't already _Tubby_. "

"Oh yeah," said Jim, wincing. "Sometimes I forget are stupid about that. I don't get why they even care."

In Jim's eyes, Toby's shape hadn't been noticeable, because he was best friend-shaped.

"People care a _lot_ ," Toby assured him. " But I don't care what people think, because I've got friends who make not-caring easy." He smiled. "You've got friends who don't care, so I hope that helps you not care as much."

"Yeah," Jim said softly. "Yeah, it does."

He breathed in and out again, finally smiling a little.

Times like this, he felt there was another thing besides the heartstone that was worth going to New Jersey for: better cell phone reception. That brought the total number of reasons New Jersey wasn't a worthless state that needed to be sawed off the continent Bugs Bunny style to an impressive grand total of _two_.

* * *

An hour before sunset, Claire needed to be sleeping, but she couldn't.

Her new sleep schedule was still taking some getting used to. It was easy for her to fall asleep at 4 PM after a long day of route-finding in the sun, but she still kept waking up around nightfall feeling weirdly like she'd missed the day. Rather than toss and turn in her lean-to and wait for sleep that wasn't coming, she'd taken herself for a short walk to historic Camp 4, where she filled her water bottles and listened to the rock climbers, clustered around their campfires and laughing, smelling strongly herbal. Camp 4 was not backwoodsy enough for the trolls to come near, but Claire was happy to take advantage of the source of freshwater (and a toilet that _flushed_ ) was too much to pass up.

She put her filled water bottles into her backpack and shouldered the supply, picking up her tree-branch walking stick to return to the trolls. She walked into the dark woods without attracting any attention and found her way back to the moss-covered crack in the stones that led to a small troll tunnel.

She was lowering her backpack into the crack when something changed. The night didn't smell right. She wouldn't have noticed the acrid smell in a polluted city, but up in the fresh, cool mountain air it caught her attention.

She stared into the darkening woods and saw nothing. The smell had blown away on a small breeze. She could ignore it -

Who was she kidding? The turn her life had taken, she couldn't ignore _anything_ suspicious.

She also couldn't go looking for something in the deep, dark forest alone, not when her only weapon was a stick with no power besides being heavy when she hit things with it.

Claire slipped into the tunnel and flicked on her headlamp, jogging back to the trolls.

* * *

With Blinky so busy keeping peace, Nomura had taken charge of Jim's daily training. It felt...right. No one could take Draal's place, but someone needed to take his role, and Nomura was the natural choice. Now that she'd softened a little, Jim saw more things she and Draal'd had in common, and it made more and more sense that they'd seen some of those things in each other, once upon a time.

Jim was sure they both saw the empty space where Draal was supposed to be, as if they'd decided without speaking that the best thing they could do to honor him was build on everything Draal had drilled into Jim.

Today they were dancing through the forest, playing a brutal game of practice tag in the tree branches as much as on the ground. The sun had set behind the mountains, and Jim only risked being burned if he went _too_ high in the trees. He followed her from branch to branch, snatching at her ponytail in an attempt to tug her out of the canopy. "Aha!" he crowed, bursting through the leaves triumphantly, hand outstretched to grab her hoofed foot. "Gotchuuuh? Wait, what?"

She wasn't there.

"Oh, come on, where could she -"

A strong hand grabbed his foot and yanked him down through the leaves. Nomura kicked him in the back and he broke through multiple branches as he fell, landing amid those branches face-first on the ground.

Nomura also landed - on his back, hooves-first. The sound of the wind being knocked out of him could've been written as a keyboard smash. Maybe something like: _WHOORMPH_!

Jim's vision went black, a state of pain he'd found himself in many, many times since he'd become the Trollhunter.

 _Hello darkness my old friend..._

"You're getting cocky, little Gynt." Nomura flipped off his back and stood over him with a look of deep satisfaction over a lesson communicated with painful perfection.

"Hwarghoomphle," Jim said back because that was the only noise he could make.

"Which one of His Verboseness' rules would this little exercise be a reminder of again?"

"Rule one," Jim groaned, spitting out pine needles and rolling over so he could breathe better. "Definitely rule one."

Oh god, he was going to puke.

"You can't let your new strength and speed go to your head." Nomura placed a hand on her hip. "You may have defeated Gunmar, but there will always be someone faster or stronger or smarter than you. Or able to walk free in sunlight. I had you dancing around for an hour just by dipping above the canopy. It's easy to tire you out and slow you down."

So it _hadn't_ been an honest game of keep away. Nomura had fought smarter, wearing him down until she was, again, faster than him, too.

"You fight like you're starting at the top, but you still need to fight like you're starting at a disadvantage. Because someday soon, you will be again."

"Unghuhg," Jim said in response, in a vague affirmative. To make sure she knew he'd learned his lesson, he gave her a wobbly thumbs up with one hand.

Nomura reached down to help him up, her smile smug. Jim took her hand gratefully, climbing to his feet and bowing over with his hands on his knees, still wheezing.

"It's - it's easy to forget," he gasped out. "It feels...good to be this much stronger and faster." He finally drew in a deep breath and the nausea abated slightly. "You - uh, _everyone_ I fought was so big and strong and fast compared to me, and I never got to feel even close to in control. So now having this edge, it's..."

"It's a rush," Nomura finished. "But being in control of yourself isn't the same as being in control of a fight. There's no such thing as control in a fight. There's always a chance something will change and that you'll have to adapt. But if you understand that? _That's_ your edge."

Jim nodded. "So...remembering I might be at a disadvantage is the way I can avoid being at a disadvantage, even when it seems like I'm _not_ at a disadvantage but actually _am_ at a disadvantage because I didn't...think I was disadvantaged?"

"Now you're getting it."

Jim actually was getting it. Blinky right about always being afraid, always understanding that a fight could turn uglier in a hurry, and Nomura was teaching him the same lesson.

He still could bleed. He still could hurt. He still could die.

And he almost had, thanks to Morgana, even with the strength to defeat Gunmar.

Claire burst through the underbrush.

"Jim! Nomura! I think something's wrong," she said.

"What is it?" Jim asked.

"I know this probably sounds like nothing but back near the human camp, I smelled something weird and chemical and it felt like I was being watched. It seemed...off."

"It wasn't like propane or car exhaust?" asked Jim.

"No, like ammonia or something. It burned the inside of my nose."

Jim looked at Nomura and frowned. "That's strange."

"No," Nomura interrupted, unsheathing her scythes. "It's strange that I smell it, too. Right now."

"Claire!" Jim shouted, as the underbrush behind her rustled. The leaves caught and burned with a chemical-blue fire -

A long, catlike thing leaped at Claire, burning blue and smelling noxious. Claire sidestepped with a shriek and Jim's tossed glaive struck it a glancing blow, redirecting the thing's attention to him.

The creature spewed blue flames from its mouth as it leaped at him. Jim summoned Daylight, raised it to take a swing… and then watched Claire hit the creature with her walking stick so hard that if the body hadn't hit a tree, it would've been a solid home run. It crumpled to the ground, lifeless, and the aura of fire around it sizzled out. The tree and Claire's stick both smoked lightly.

" _Nice_ ," said Jim.

"Huh. Your form's not terrible," Nomura said, sauntering over to stand beside Jim. She looked at Claire, still heaving breaths in and out from her run and her panicked stick attack. She nodded. "Even without magic, you're not without potential. For a soft human child, at least."

"Uh, thanks?" said Claire, choosing to ignore the 'soft human child' part in favor of the compliment. She wiped the singed portion of her stick on the ground and looked at the body. "What _is_ that thing?"

The glow had faded from the dead...whatever. It was at least three feet long, like a stretched out sphinx cat, mostly bald except for the faint fuzz of stiff fluorescent hairs. The whip-long tail had 8 bony nubs like a string of beads and Claire was glad it hadn't managed to use it on her before she got her blow in.

With a hiss, the thing's ribs sagged suddenly. Its skin grew more transparent by the second, the body rotting before their eyes.

The sound of running feet alerted them to the arrival of more trolls, Blinky in the lead.

"Master Jim, Claire, what is it? We heard Claire scream - oh my."

"Blinky, Claire smelled something weird and felt like she was being watched back at the human camp. That thing followed her over from there. What is it?"

"How unusual," said Blinky, bending down for a closer look. "Judging from the fluorescent coloring and the tail, I believe that may be a santer."

"A santer?"

"Known for their predation on human livestock, santers are capable of knocking larger animals out with but a single swing of their tails and produce a dangerous, flesh-melting chemical fire. They decompose quickly after death, much like many other creatures unknown to the human world." Blinky rubbed his chin. "It's strange to see one so far from their natural range. I believe they're most commonly seen below what humans call the 'Mason-Dixon line,' particularly in the state of North Carolina. It's also rare to see one alone; they usually travel in packs."

Claire's eyes widened. "The campers!"

"Claire, show us exactly where you first smelled that smell," said Jim.

Claire bolted down the trail, stick in hand, Jim close behind. To their surprise, another runner joined them as Claire led Jim back to the tunnel to camp. Nomura slipped into the tunnel in front of Jim, pushing him aside, catching up to Claire.

"Hey!" he shouted from behind. Nomura ignored him.

"If you're already good enough to kill something with a stick," Nomura said to Claire as they journeyed down the tunnel, "I might as well teach you to do it with finesse."

"You know how to fight with a staff too?" Claire asked.

"I know how to kill things with lots of other things. Sticking to one weapon is preference," said Nomura. "We'll start tomorrow."

"Thanks," Claire said. She realized this was an incredible offer. Nomura had important enough work training Jim without taking her on as well, and doubtless learning to fight from Nomura would be painful and challenging, but for Nomura to care that she learned to fight at all, instead of treating her as hopelessly powerless without her staff -

Well, Claire thought she'd earned that consideration but Nomura still wasn't easily impressed.

"I know there's more I can do, even without a magic weapon," said Claire with an excited grin. "I won't waste your time."

"Then get out of my way," Nomura said, shoving Claire aside. An acrid smell reached Claire's nostrils as Nomura surged ahead. She flashed Claire a rare, slightly wicked smile. "You've had enough fun for one day. Now _share_."

"You'll do great!" Jim added, also surging ahead of her, patting her briefly on the shoulder before the two faster fighters left Claire behind.

"I should feel less excited when a bunch of hippies' lives are in danger," Claire joked, mostly to herself. But hey, even with the Skathe-Hrün gone, this adventuring life still agreed with her.

She trailed the two through the caves with Blinky behind her.

* * *

Silence and an empty forest greeted them on the other side. They walked carefully through the dark, Jim leading the way, Daylight in hand. Nomura walked side by side with him, picking up a long straight branch to demonstrate for Claire, who brought up the rear with Blinky. Claire held her improvised staff at the ready and Blinky clearly planned on using the staff he inherited from Vendel the same way. The other trolls had stayed behind - a good idea considering their proximity to Camp 4.

"Tread carefully!" warned Blinky. "Their bright coloring and distinctive smell force santers to hunt by ambush. They're quite skilled at mounting a surprise attack, and their tails are capable of snapping a neck or a spine."

There wasn't a sound from the woods as they walked, not a snapping twig or crackling leaf. Only the distant sound of reveling campers reached them.

Light flashed at the corner of Jim's eye. The creature launched, its tail snapped, but Jim dove aside before moving was even a conscious thought, then turned and sliced the creature apart. The attack came in earnest, more santers launching from hidden branches and pouncing from behind rocks. But even in number, they were no match for the Trollhunters.

Nomura crowed triumphantly as she twisted and dodged, evading the launching creatures and their snapping tails, twirling her "staff" with expert skill. Jim responded to their speed by dispersing Daylight and slicing through their attacks with his glaives, tossing one periodically in a long arc, killing several at once. Claire continued showing the adeptness that Nomura had praised. She twirled her staff with a practiced hand, knocking the creatures out of the air.

After facing Gunmar, this was easy - fun, even.

Jim smiled proudly as he watched Claire smack one creature with such force that it sailed away in the distance.

"I don't know much about sportball, but I'm gonna pretend I do. Good job grand slamming that three point dunk into the end zone!" Jim cried out as he sliced a glaive through another.

He'd played baseball when he was younger, but not for long, and he barely remembered the rules.

Claire laughed, knocking another santer thirty feet into a tree.

"And the crowd goes wild!" cried Jim. "Claire Nunez, everyone, up for the MVP hall of fame - ow!"

Jim's crow cut off as Nomura bopped him in the back of the head with her stick.

"Rule one," she snarled.

"Rule one, indeed!" echoed Blinky, as he smacked a santer away. "Admittedly, these creatures are far from the worst threat we've faced, but that's no reason to get overconfident, Master Jim!"

"Okay, okay, rule one! I'm rule one-ing now," Jim said, focusing _maybe_ a little more.

"You too," Nomura snapped at Claire.

"I'm rule one-ing," she said sheepishly.

They didn't have to Rule One long. Claire smacked the last creature down and no more came. They left the decaying bodies to scout, but saw nothing more.

"Blinky, do you think that's all of them?" asked Jim.

"I believe so, Master Jim. This fracas surely would have caught the attention of their compatriots, if any compatriots were to exist. I'm still puzzled over their presence here." Blinky rubbed his chin. "I suppose it's possible a mischief of santers got confused while migrating and wound up wandering a great distance outside their natural range."

"A continent's width of distance? What could make them do that?" asked Claire.

"I've read the occasional discarded scientific magazine and learned the human-caused blight known as 'global warming' has confused many migrating creatures. That could be a factor; such changes in climate would affect many magical creatures as well."

"I guess global warming makes as much sense as anything," said Jim, disappearing his glaives.

"Ugh, what is that?" a human voice carried from the distance. "I smell something."

"But perhaps we should ruminate on the environmental perils of carbon emissions elsewhere," said Blinky anxiously. "Back to the tunnel! Quickly!"

They ran, but Jim glanced backward briefly. A part of him almost ached to see another human, even though he knew there was nowhere good that could go. Claire, two steps ahead, reached for his hand, wrapped her small fingers around his and pulled him on. Her touch was a tether pulling him back from thoughts of the divide between himself and the campers.

Maybe he could never cross that divide but he still had something solid to hold onto.

* * *

They returned well past Claire's bedtime. She needed to rest during the evening and early night so she could wake early enough to travel with the trolls under cover of darkness, but still stay awake long enough to do her daywork of getting maps, shopping for supplies, and asking for information. So even though night had fallen, prime activity time for the trolls, Jim decided to settle in with her in their shelter and catch a catnap.

"I was thinking about taking a shower, but I am so done for the day," Claire complained. She held some of her hair to her nose. "Even though that chemical smell soaked into my hair."

"It's not that bad," said Jim, but he wrinkled his nose as he sniffed the air. He unfastened the clothespins holding the bug netting together and swept it open for Claire, then followed her inside, careful to stoop extra low so his horns didn't get stuck in the lean-to. Again. The other trolls had built it, slightly redesigned from instructions Claire had shared from a survival book she'd downloaded to her phone. Jim liked the A-frame they had now better than their old, triangular single roof-wall.

It was a little easier for Jim to sit up in. It was also a little more private, having two walls instead of one. And it was cozy, which was important for Claire, who needed to be able to sleep during the heat of afternoon and through the sudden temperature drop that followed sunset.

It was almost a little _too_ cozy. Before the trolls had perfected the A-frame, they'd done their night-time rituals outside the lean-to and scooted in when they were done. Now there was enough room to do everything inside the shelter...barely. Claire nearly elbowed him in the face three times while he worked on their sleeping bag and pillow situation, just in the process of taking out her hair clips.

Claire, Jim had learned, wore ten million hair clips for a reason. When freed from its clippy confines her hair _sproinged_ and expanded to twice its normal volume. Back when they still had an unshredded tent, they'd left it one morning before Claire put the clips back in. Not only did her hair terrify a small troll child, but Blinky had nearly caused a panic screaming at Jim to close his eyes lest he be turned to stone by the Gorgon in their midst.

Now she was so self-conscious about her hair that she kept it clipped until right before bed. She tried and failed to push her fingers through the poofy, increasingly greasy curls self consciously.

"Ugh, I always feel so weird about you seeing my hair this messy," she said.

"I think it's cute," said Jim, settling back on the camp mats to smile at her messy-cute hair.

"And I haven't been able to wash my face properly in weeks -"

"It's still a pretty face. Also my face looks like...it does, and you're okay with _that._ "

Claire huffed out a soft laugh. "There's nothing wrong with your face. It's a cute face," she said, drawing her finger along his jawline.

Jim wrapped his arms around her waist, and returned the smile. "I kind of like it like this. You know, how you're comfortable enough around me to go au naturel."

She raised an eyebrow. "Au naturel?"

"Uh, uuuh, in the… no makeup sense," he quickly self-corrected. "Not the - not the other sense."

"Mmm hmm," she said, smirking at him.

Jim's cheeks flushed slightly. He went on, "It makes me think of…"

He trailed off, not sure how to put it into words.

"Of what?"

"Well, it's all a little..." He shrugged one shoulder slightly, then the other. "Domestic."

Claire giggled.

"Domestic. Wow, _so_ romantic."

"Well, it is!" Jim insisted. "I...never got to see that growing up. But in movies where two people are together, sometimes they'll do things like… like he'll zip her dress and she'll tie his tie for him and...wow, I'm getting into weird territory here with the dress zipping." Claire was still smiling at him, though, so he plowed on through. "I mean, that sort of relationship seemed almost...fairy tale. In a good way."

It wasn't mundane - he hadn't grown up seeing it. It was a special thing, and one he wanted.

Claire looked skeptical, though. "Me having a blotchy face and hair that looks like baby birds should live in it is your fairy tale?"

"Yes," Jim nodded, solemnly. "Yes it is. In fact, if you want to put on some cold cream -"

Claire laughed and took the idea and ran with it. "- And one of those little eye masks with the ice packs. And maybe put a little kerchief in my hair -"

"Yeah, if you want to do any of that, go _crazy_."

Claire kept smiling at him, and reached her hand up to thread her fingers into the scruff on the back of his neck. Jim sighed and leaned closer into her embrace.

Claire, still giggling a little at the picture they'd painted, surprised him with a kiss. They hadn't kissed much since hitting the road. Their lean-tos hadn't offered enough privacy. But now that they had some, now that their travel had taken on a routine, now they had space to have a Moment. Jim worried that his protruding fangs were unpleasant to work around, but his lips were still mostly pliable, and Claire seemed to mind taking the time to figure it out...so they took the time.

And once they did? _Bliss_.

A lot of the things Jim had hoped for in his life had been lost to him, now that he couldn't be a part of human society - or go out in daylight - but the fact that he could still count "making out with my amazing girlfriend in the woods" as a present and future delight did a lot to bolster his spirits.

They kissed until they were both tense and breathless, and then broke apart and laid down on their sides, facing each other.

She caressed his hands and he rubbed hers back.

Slyly, Jim said, "If I profane with my unworthiest hand this holy shrine, the gentle sin is this: My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss."

Claire picked up what he'd put down and immediately ran with it.

"Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much. Which mannerly devotion shows in this, for saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch, and palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss."

"Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?"

"Ay, pilgrim." Claire gently stroked his cheek. "Lips that they must use in prayer."

"O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do. They pray; grant thou, lest faith turn to despair."

"Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake."

"Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take." Jim leaned over and kissed her gently. "Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged."

"Then have my lips the sin that they have took."

"Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again!"

This time Claire kissed him, long and deep, then drew back and lay looking at him.

"You kiss by th' book," she said, with a sly raise of an eyebrow.

Jim broke character.

"Yeah, I have a good study buddy," he said.

Claire laughed, then stared at him adoringly, but she was too tired to do it for long. Her eyelids fluttered shut. Jim tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, tracing the well-worn path her own fingertips often did when she bashfully tucked her hair out of her face.

It wasn't zipping up a dress, but it may as well have been.

"You should go to sleep," he said gently, when he noticed her trying to keep her eyelids open. "You're not going to have much time to before we move again."

"Good night, Jim," she said softly.

"Good night, Claire."

Her eyes drifted shut and he lay there, watching her sleep, waiting for sleep to take him too. He was tired, but not "crash right away" tired. He wished it was easy like it used to be, but his hybrid nature kept hunger, or time for healing or sleep, unpredictable. He stayed awake for quite some time after Claire's breathing had evened. He didn't mind at all. Claire was okay with him being there, so it meant he had tacit permission to watch her sleep. So he watched the fading light outside soften her features, and seared her face onto his memory, grateful that their time, even on the move, occasionally stood still like this.

Like he'd told Toby, every feeling he had these days filled him to bursting. The positive emotions weren't painful like the negative ones but they were no less intense. He felt that intensity there beside Claire, and was overcome with warmth - love - protectiveness, and other strange feelings he couldn't name.

The other strange feelings he couldn't name were probably behind what happened next.

Because a bug crawled into her hair.

And everything went downhill from there.

* * *

A short time later, Blinky stared up at the top of a very tall tree, six eyes blinking in owlish confusion. The situation left him - nay, the whole camp - completely at a loss. All that anyone could definitely discern was that there _was_ a problem - and the problem had escalated completely out of control.

"Master Jim, I've attempted gentle persuasion and that's been extremely inefficacious thus far, so you've left me no choice but to attempt forceful, authoritative resolve:" Blinky pointed at the ground. "Get down from there right this instant!"

"NO!"

Several pine needles fell from the tree with the force of Jim's shout.

" _I live here now!_ "

Blinky sighed. "Master Jim, you've left me no choice. I'm afraid I have to call in heavy reinforcements."

Blinky pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed.

"No point!" Atop the massive pine tree, Jim huddled against the trunk for maximum camouflage and hollered down. "I'm not coming down and Mom can't make me either!"

Downstate, Barbara Lake had just gotten to sleep after her latest 14 hour shift at the hospital. Her phone rang with one of the extra loud tones she'd assigned to a few specific numbers, and she bolted upright in bed, her hair tangled half-in her scrunchy and her glasses dangling off one ear. She looked at the clock blearily.

Then, registering what it meant to get a call from that number just past midnight, she frantically grabbed her phone and shoved her glasses back on her face.

"Mr. Blinky, what's wrong?"

Back in Yosemite, Blinky peered up the tree.

"I'm sorry to wake you at this hour. It's nothing disastrous, Barbara, but I need your help. Master Jim seems to be...ah, emotionally distressed over something, but is having difficulties articulating the tribulation at the root of his perturbation."

"My _what_?!" Jim cried out. "What are you telling her that I'm _doing_ up here?!"

Blinky held a hand on the speaker so Barbara didn't have him yelling in her ear. "Your perturbation, Master Jim! 'Perturbation' is a state of being perturbed, as in upset or distressed!"

"...oh." A pause. "I thought you said something else."

"Perhaps if you were to come down from the tree, you'd more easily be able to hear my diction accurately!"

"I'M NOT COMING DOWN. EVER!"

"He's up a tree?" asked Barbara.

"Yes, he's relocated himself up a particularly towering ponderosa pine and is insisting - as you perhaps heard - that he's never coming down."

"Blinky, put me on speaker," Barbara suggested. He did so and held up the phone. Barbara called up - "Jim, honey, why do you want to live in a tree _now_?"

"It's none of your business!" Jim shouted, from his new tree-house.

"Excuse me, mister!" Barbara projected her gasp all the way up to the canopy. "I think you should come down from that tree right now and say that where I can see your face!"

Atop the tree, Jim winced. "Sorry, Mom," he called, sounding reticent. "But I'm staying here!"

"None of you can climb the tree?" she asked Blinky.

"Most of us are too heavy. I'd have concerns regarding its structural integrity if anyone larger than Jim himself were to make the attempt. Nomura or Not-Enrique could perhaps -"

"Climb up there when all I'm likely to get for me trouble is a kick to me face?" interrupted Not-Enrique. "Not a chance! Normally I'd start a pool to take bets on how long 'e stays up, but Jim's an alright kid so I'm holding back."

"How generous of you," said Blinky with a flat expression. He turned to Nomura, who stood nearby with her arms crossed. "Nomura, what about you?"

"I don't _do_ teen angst."

"The only other alternative is Claire -"

"No! If you wake up Claire, I'll go live in another tree instead, where nobody can find me!"

"Jim, talk to us, honey. Why do you want to live in a tree? What happened?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"If it's making you feel this bad, you need to talk about it. Whatever it is, I'm sure it's not that bad -"

"It's the worst!"

"- and that you can get past it if we talk about it -"

"My life is over!"

Barbara was stymied. That came as no shock to Blinky. He'd learned enough about their relationship to know that Jim had been an almost supernaturally well-behaved child for most of his life. The problems she'd had once Jim became the Trollhunter had come from Jim keeping everything locked away, unspoken. For Jim to throw a dramatic tantrum, why, Blinky wondered if Jim had even _done_ such a thing before, outside of his his human larval stage - a time that most humans got a little screamy.

In fact, Jim's intense emotions were often a shock to Jim as well. Perhaps it had been only a matter of time before he underwent a bout of emotional distress like the one he'd had right after his change.

"This is pretty severe," said Barbara thoughtfully. "I'm bringing in more backup. Let me call you through the group chat app this time."

Barbara hung up. A moment passed and Blinky accepted an invite into a group video chat. A new window sprung up besides Barbara's, and Blinky put the call on speaker again, holding it up to face Jim.

"Jim, buddy, why d'you live in a tree all of a sudden?" Toby asked, groggy in his Gun Robot jim-jams.

"Nobody will understand! Tell everyone to go back to sleep and forget I was ever born."

"I will not!" said Toby, scandalized at the mere suggestion.

"And I wouldn't believe him," Barbara added. "Your birth is 23 hours of my life I am _never_ going to forget."

"MOM!"

"Just tell us what's going on, Jimbo," Toby said gently.

"Tell friends. Friends help," Arrrgh looked over Toby's shoulder, barely in frame.

"Who else are you going to call, Mom?" Jim cried out with a scowl. "Are you going to call Steve next?"

"Would that help?" Barbara asked, mistaking his tone. "Hold on, I'll see if he's awake..."

"No, it won't help! That will not help!"

Barbara didn't answer. She'd already cut the video and muted the chat.

"...Mom?"

"She may be privately contacting - ah yes, someone else has joined the chat," said Blinky.

"Lake, why are you up a tree, man? It's butt o'clock at night, you buttsnack."

"You actually called Steve?!" Jim shrieked. " _Why would you call Steve_? I was being sarcastic!"

"Well, how was I supposed to tell?" said Barbara. "I'm not used to you being this sarcastic! You never used to talk back!"

"WELL I GUESS I'M SETTING ALL KINDS OF UNCOMFORTABLE MILESTONES TODAY!"

"Jim, talk to us, sweetie. I know you're going through a lot of changes. It can be confusing and even embarrassing. Your emotions are a wilder hormonal roller coaster than they were before. But whatever it is that's bothering you, we're here for you, and there's nothing you could say that would make us see you any differently."

He went quiet for a long time and let out a shaky breath. It seemed as if they'd finally gotten shrunk in closer to the tree, shifting in the small nest of branches that held him up. After all the dramatics and the yelling, his final admission was quiet.

"Claire was sleeping and … I don't know what came over me. Like some weird instinct I - I don't understand why I did it." He paused, dragging the admission out. "I ate - I ate th -"

Steve cut in with a gasp, "You ate Claire?"

In horror, Jim screamed "NO!"

"Then who'd you eat, Jim?" Steve pressed.

"It wasn't a who, okay!" Jim shouted. "It was a bug! In her hair! It was in her hair so I picked it _out of her hair_ and I ate it! _I ate the bug_!"

It burst out of him in his hurry to correct Steve. Jim looked askance, realizing what - and how fast - he'd admitted it.

"So I'm NEVER LEAVING THIS TREE because I LIVE HERE NOW and YOU'LL ALL NEVER SEE ME AGAIN IT'S FOR THE BEST ALRIGHT BYE."

Jim disappeared.

Well, he didn't actually disappear. He climbed around the treetrunk, leaping through the branches a little higher. The trunk blocked him from view of Blinky's phone.

Mostly.

"Jim." Toby cut in. "Hey, Jim. We can still see you. Like… even with Blinky only using his phone light."

"Yeah, you don't have a lot of real estate up there, Lake," Steve added.

"Also, you can't live up there," Toby pointed out, "because the sun will eventually come up and that's a _little_ too high up in the canopy."

Jim was silent for a moment. He squirmed back down a little bit. He said nothing, other than emitting a growly chuffing noise, like an irritated shepherd dog.

Barbara struggled - and succeeded admirably - in not laughing at her son. "Honey, what made you feel like you should eat the bug?"

"I don't know! That's the whole problem! We were going to bed and cuddling and everything was nice and we said good night and she went to sleep and I wasn't tired yet, so I was looking at her and everything was perfect... " Jim buried his head in his hands. "And then I saw a bug in her hair and I picked it out and _I ate it_! "

"Like it was some kind of instinct?" Barbara asked.

Jim groaned, his head still in his hands. "Who sees a bug and instinctively thinks 'I should eat that?' Who thinks that?"

"Uh," Steve helpfully pointed out. "You do, obviously."

Jim bared his fangs at the distant phone. "Why are you even still _here_ , Steve?"

"Hey, I'm helping! I didn't have to wake up, Lake!" Steve pouted, clearly irritated over Jim not understanding that he'd actually left the chat app open to ping so he'd hear it no matter what. "And it's not my fault you're acting like a monkey."

"A monkey?" Blinky inquired, raising his eyebrows.

"Uh, _yeah_. He's climbing up trees and eating bugs off people, right? That's what monkeys do?"

"That _is_ kind of what monkeys do," Toby put in.

"Why would I be acting like a monkey? Shouldn't I be acting like a human or a troll or...a whatever that's both those things at the same time?"

"A salient question, indeed, Master Jim." Blinky was suddenly in deep thought, one of his hands rubbing at his chin. The other waved towards the nearby trolls who had gathered. "One of you, bring me the wizard!"

"Already ahead of you," said Nomura. She had briefly slipped away and had already returned, bodily dragging Merlin along in a headlock. "This is _his_ fault."

"Unhand me, changeling!" Merlin drew away from her and rubbed his lower back. "Even with my magic back, I'm not getting any younger, you know."

"Wizard," said Blinky, "Master Jim is dealing with new instincts, but they seem neither trollish nor human in nature. Modern humans have eschewed their primate roots and trolls have never had grooming instincts due to symbiotic species like the gnomes. So why -" He gestured with every arm not holding the phone "- is Master Jim experiencing such instincts? When you pulled him apart and put him back together, precisely what elements from each species did you include?"

"Elements?" Merlin scoffed. "You talk like I scoured both species for specific attributes and made exhaustive lists. I didn't even have a full Alchemist's lab to work with. No, the time and resources being what they were, I just -" He waved his hands vaguely. "- threw something together."

"You changed his nature and ' _just threw something together_ '?" Blinky cried out in outrage.

"Well, I didn't have much to work with, did I? All that was necessary were the most important fundamental attributes. As for how it all gelled together, I 'winged it,' as the youths say."

"You can't 'wing it' with a magical transformation potion!" Jim cried. "I'm not a crock pot casserole!"

"And yet I did. As for what that means regarding his new nature, the nitty gritty specifics, he'll have to discover them for himself." Merlin stretched. "Anyway, your questions have been answered and I need my rest."

"You also can't just shrug and say -" Toby made an "I dunno" noise "- and wander off again!"

"I can't?" asked Merlin. "Hmm. And yet I seem to be doing it."

He shrugged, made the 'I dunno' noise, and wandered off.

"Wizard so useless ," said Arrrgh in venomous frustration, "Arrrgh need _more_ words that mean same as 'useless.'"

"You said it, Wingman," said Toby. "I'll hit the thesaurus and write a few down for you. Off the top of my head, I got: hopeless, inept, and worthless. Ooh, and feckless. I love that one."

"His demonstration of worthlessness, while frustrating, did have _some_ worth, Master Jim."

"Oh yeah? How?"

"His lack of an answer is, in itself, an answer," said Blinky. "It means that no one has any answers about your new nature - but if that is the case, you shouldn't expect easy answers of yourself, either. There's no telling what ancient trollish or human instincts Merlin unearthed with his...feckless meddling."

"And that's supposed to make me feel better?" Jim asked. "That means I'm Frankenstein."

"Frankenstein was the scientist," Steve corrected unhelpfully.

"That means I'm Frankenstein's _monster_." Jim let go of the tree, digging his bare feet into the branch he was perched on and looked at his mismatched hands. "Even my brain doesn't know what it's supposed to be."

"Honey, your urges are natural," said Barbara.

"She's right, Master Jim. Whatever urges you're feeling are -"

Jim groaned. "Please stop saying 'urges'! I feel like I'm getting the Talk all over again."

"Jim, you're not a monster, you're a miracle," said Barbara gently. "We live in a beautiful world, with all kinds of life in it. Even if Merlin fecklessly worked up some weird juju in his magical petri dish -"

"Look, Arrrgh, I started a trend," Toby observed brightly.

"- what he rebuilt you from were humans and trolls - two natural species in the world. And that means you're still from nature and part of nature. That means anything you are, or do, or feel, is natural."

"An apt observation, Barbara!" Blinky chirped. "Jim, you are the best of both our species now, and while what you've become is...something new, isn't that in and of itself a process natural to most non-troll species? According to the human scientific concept of 'evolution,' a member of a species develops a random mutation that, in the best scenario, provides them with advantages and increased chances of survival. In your case, with your defeat of Gunmar, it's obvious that the changes were advantageous. This means you're not monstrous, you're _evolved_."

"Evolved," Jim echoed. That sounded much better than 'Smashed haphazardly together.'

"Perhaps Merlin magically forcing this process in his attempt at hybridization simply unearthed a few ancient instincts endemic to both of our species," Blinky went on. "Evolutionary throwbacks, if you will. Though they may be alien or embarrassing, these urges are hardly unnatural, as Barbara said."

"You're making it sound so...science-ey," Jim said. "And normal. How did you make eating a bug sound _normal_?"

"Well, I was a biologist before I decided to go to med school," said Barbara.

"And I do consider myself something of a natural philosopher, alongside being a historian," Blinky said, snapping his suspenders with two of his free hands.

After a long silence, Jim sighed. "I'm coming down now."

He jumped, landing heavily on the ground. Blinky stepped in close and drew Jim in for a hug.

"Mr. Blinky, make sure that's all arms included, so I can pretend at least one pair are mine," said Barbara forlornly.

"It was so gross," said Jim, finally blurting it all out into Blinky's shoulder, "and so _weird_ and the worst part is it _actually tasted good_. "

"It's hardly gross or weird, Master Jim. Though not one of our primary sources of sustenance, trolls are known to eat members of the phylum Arthropoda on occasion."

"Humans in plenty of countries do it, too. When I was in the Peace Corps in Ecuador, I ate spiced beetles and palm weevil grubs."

"Ew."

"Don't ew me, they were delicious! And high in protein."

"And it's natural for any nurturing or grooming instincts to be directed at those you care for," Blinky continued, one hand gently cradling the back of Jim's head.

"Yeah, if you ever pick a bug off me and eat it, I'd be flattered!" said Toby.

"But what if I do it again without thinking? And Claire sees? She'll think it's so gross."

"Then tell her ahead of time, Lake," said Steve, with a 'duh' in his voice, and then with a 'duh' out loud. " _Duh_. Finding out more about someone makes you hate them less, not more. Like how I found out about your trollhunting thingy and it made me think you were, y'know, alright. And now finding this out makes me want to laugh at you -"

"Thanks, Steve," Jim said rolling his eyes.

"- but also makes me think 'Hey, Lake has all this crazy stuff he's going through and he still tries to be a good guy even though the crazy stuff is hard to deal with' and then I think you're, y'know, _more_ alright."

Jim reeled back out of Blinky's grip, purely out of shock.

"Thanks, Steve?" he said with sincerity. "That was...way more insightful than I was expecting. That's actually helpful. I'm...glad my mom invited you to my mortification party."

"Yeah, Steve!" said Toby, encouraging. "Way to go with that emotional insight!"

"See? That's what I'm talking about. _Layers._ I'm like an onion now. Be the onion, Lake."

"Are you feeling a little better now?" asked Barbara.

"Yeah, I think I am. Sorry," Jim said, "That I freaked everyone out. I feel so embarrassed - but about freaking everyone out now, instead of...everything."

"Ah, Master Jim, these are mere growing pains. None here stand in judgment of you for experiencing them."

* * *

Off to the side, Not-Enrique watched the mushy-gushy with more satisfaction than he cared to admit. Maybe he wasn't willing to get kicked out of a tree for no reason, but it was still nice to see the kid get the help he needed to get back on an even keel. That Steve guy's assessment of Jim undersold it: he was a lot more than 'alright.'

Not that he'd ever admit that out loud more than once.

A noise in the bush briefly caught his attention, but when he looked, he saw nothing. The noise didn't come again, so he dismissed it as a small animal or a dropping pine cone.

Still, call it his paranoid Changeling instincts, but he couldn't shake the feeling they were being watched.

* * *

In the distance where she'd relocated after the tiny Changeling had almost seen her, a young woman in forest camouflage hid and watched as the many-eyed troll spoke to the Trollhunter.

Her golden spyglass, etched with arcane designs, obliterated the darkness. Through the lens she saw everything bright as day - and magnified. The silver horn at her ear let her hear everything, too. She might as well have been part of the group hug.

This group of weirdos clearly supported each other. And the Trollhunter? Total dreamboat, even though his fashion sense was terrible. (Sweat pants and souvenir hoodies galore.) But it wasn't his fault. It wasn't like there was a Monster Big N' Tall for him to go to.

They seemed nice. Like, really nice.

But she had a job to do and the stakes were too high to do it badly. She put her spygear away and jogged deeper into the wilderness. It was time to report in.

* * *

Jim ran into Claire halfway back to their shelter.

"You didn't have to get up -" he said, at the same time she said, "I woke up and saw you were gone and tried to go back to sleep but you stayed gone so long -" and the worry in her eyes made Jim feel guilty.

"Sorry," he said, scratching the back of his neck. "I had to go - um -" he looked askance. He could always... _not_ admit to doing what he'd done -

But nah.

They walked back to the shelter, Claire listening quietly with her big eyes wide as he explained.

"I was embarrassed about something and had a little freakout - okay, maybe it was a big freakout, and Blinky called my mom and Toby and everything -"

"Why didn't you wake me up?"

"Because...because it involved you."

"How did it involve me?"

"Claire," he said, pausing dramatically. "I ate a bug. Like...that was in your hair. I saw it and I grabbed it and I ate it. Blinky and my mom think the way Merlin took me apart and put me back together gave me weird ancient human instincts, like _animal_ instincts, but it's still weird and it's still embarrassing and _I still ate a bug_ -"

Claire stared ahead, quiet for a moment as she processed all the rambling.

As she ducked down to get back in their shelter, she asked, "So...how does it feel to be the only somewhat-human who's ever eaten a bug in their life?"

Jim felt several of his organs compress like they were mercy-killing him out of the situation. He ducked down and followed her in. "Well I - I guess it -"

He suddenly caught Claire's small, amused smile and the humor in her voice finally registered.

"You're making fun of me," he accused. "I mean, I'd make fun of me for eating a bug too, but -"

"Then you'll have to make fun of me as well, after you look up what chapulines are," Claire said, snickering. "My abuelita sometimes makes them when we visit."

Jim had no idea what chapulines were, but the idea that Claire was presenting, that she had eaten some sort of grandma-cooked bug made him realize that of _course_ she was kidding.

"Uh. Mom said she ate some grubs and stuff when she was in the Peace Corps in Ecuador," he volunteered. "Which...still makes eating a bug out of your girlfriend's hair seem weird to me. Doesn't that seem weird to you? Aren't you weirded out?"

"Weirded out? By your strange new half-troll instincts? When people have been eating bugs since, oh, the dawn of humanity?" Claire laughed. "I'd be weirded out if you'd eaten my hair maybe, but -" she paused, looking at him. "You...don't want to eat my hair, do you?"

"Oh I don't know, a little alfredo, maybe some lemon zest, it could go down easy," Jim said, but Claire, unlike him, picked up on the joking tone right away and laughed.

"Maybe if you soaked all the frizz out with conditioner first," she said, pressing down on her tangles. "I think this bird's nest would choke you to death."

Her smattering of real embarrassment made Jim laugh.

"I ate a bug out of your hair and you're _still_ stuck on it being a little poofy?"

"Jim, when someone calls you a gorgon, you don't forget it in a hurry!"

She'd accepted his new little bout of weirdness in the space of a heartbeat and already moved on.

She was right about her hair looking like it was a nest for baby birds and she was right about her face being blotchy but as she stared at him with half-lidded eyes in the small sliver of moonlight that only he could see in, he still thought her face was the most beautiful thing that he'd ever seen.

It would always be, even if it got scarred, even if it got old and wrinkled.

"You know, I don't think I've said it back yet," he whispered. "I can't believe I haven't yet."

"Said what?"

"I love you," Jim said breathlessly.

Claire smiled and Jim thought it was radiant. The light in her eyes cut through the dark even better than his armor's light did.

"I love you, too."

She'd said it before, on the school roof, but it thrilled him as much to hear her say it again.

"All of you," she added. "Even the parts you think are embarrassing."

"It's just...hard," Jim admitted. "There's all these weird new instincts." Distracted by his thoughts, he added, "And old instincts getting stronger..."

"What kind of old instincts?" she asked, raising an eyebrow.

Suddenly put on the spot, Jim's eyes went wide as he realized he needed a different answer than what he'd meant and didn't have a fake one premade. As his brain cast about for one - and failed to find it - his cheeks went hot.

"Normal...human...ones?"

"What kind of normal human ones?" she asked, leaning closer.

"Ummmm."

She giggled a little and then caressed his face.

"That's not always a weird thing, Jim. Sometimes that's a normal thing that happens when feelings change. _Normal human_ instincts getting stronger. Sometimes stuff like that happens to everyone." She added wryly, "There's a reason we don't have a joint sleeping bag."

Jim choked on his own spit.

Then he grinned so hard he felt like his face was going to split and settled into his sleeping bag too, facing her. He wanted to say something but was smart enough to know that saying the wrong thing could totally kill the moment - and said underlying 'normal human instincts.' Best not give her any reasons to change her thinking on the matter.

Claire held out her hand expectantly.

"Okay. I've been having trouble sleeping. Hand it over."

"Uuuh, hand what over?"

"The tail. I want the tail."

Jim laughed and his tail snaked up through a gap in the sleeping bag blankets. She caressed the little tuft of fur gently and Jim relaxed, every muscle turning to jelly. It felt strange, but definitely like a hand, or someone petting his hair. Strange but relaxing and gentle and cuddly.

"Does this fall under 'making it weird'?" he said, closing his eyes blissfully. "I think it does."

"Nope. It falls under 'it's cute and the little fluffy part is fluffy.'"

"You know, we've been treating it like another hand, but Toby thinks it's technically part of my butt. A butt-hand, if you will."

"Jim, shut up and let me touch the butt."

Jim considered it a great accomplishment that he managed to stifle his laughter so they could actually quiet down and nap.

* * *

Deeper in the woods, the brunette woman in camouflage stopped to report.

She pulled out the magic puzzle box she'd been given by her "employer" and slid the pieces in the pattern she'd been taught. It opened with a sound like the shifting of clockwork.

"The _adorable_ little animals whose lives you made me throw away -" she growled.

" _Watch the tone_." The interrupting voice seemed almost supernaturally placid, devoid of all emotion, although it was hard to tell for sure through the voice distorter.

The woman in fatigues breathed a little snort of anger.

"Sorry. Anyway, the santers didn't even throw them off balance. They struggle more with Deep Personal Issues, so I don't think anything coming from the outside is going to throw them off. Maybe you should use one of your other denizens of evil to face them instead, and we can call it a done deal and I can get my reward."

" _I don't employ you to think. That's my job. You will test them the way I ordered you to. If the santers were ineffective, escalate. And report the results so the data can be analyzed_."

The woman clenched a fist.

"How do I know you'll give me what you promised when I'm done? If the job takes too long..."

" _Then ensure it doesn't._ "

The voice disconnected. The woman was left alone in the woods, her eyes wide and afraid. Then her eyebrows furrowed and her lips pressed together in a thin line of determination.

She tucked the device away and drew out a crystal flute, twirling it thoughtfully between her fingers. With her other hand, she drew out a small crystal ball, whispered "Coos Bay, Oregon," and disappeared with a quiet _wompwomp_ noise.


	3. But Who Was Phone?

**Chapter 3: But Who Was Phone?**

* * *

 **CW: Some mild gore this chapter**

* * *

 **Umpqua National Forest, Oregon**

"Too slow!"

 _Thwack!_ "Oof!"

"Sorry!"

Nomura chuckled, Jim groaned, and Claire winced as the Changeling ducked the human girl's swinging staff, and Claire accidentally walloped Jim in the chest.

"Man, she's fast!" Claire said, as Nomura darted away before she could even bring her staff down.

"Welcome to my world," Jim said. Claire's strike hadn't actually taken the wind out of him - just surprised him enough to let Nomura escape. "This is her taking it easy on us, by the way," he added, holding up his hand to deliver the aside.

Nomura was too fast for Claire to ever match naturally, and without the Skathe-Hrün to make portals, nothing she'd found a clever way around. It was skill alone that she had to work with - and only after drilling every day for weeks and weeks had she shown enough skill that Nomura accepted her back into actual sparring with her and Jim.

With Claire involved, Nomura restricted herself to staffs, and Jim to a short wooden sword with a blade thicker than a bokken, Troll-crafted for his practice to mimic the balance and weight of Daylight.

"Less chitchat, more attempted mauling," she chided, leaping onto a boulder. Jim leaped after her, but Nomura blocked his blows with her bo. Claire took advantage of Nomura's distraction to look for solid ground the Changeling might leap to next.

She guessed correctly. Jim pressed Nomura to the edge of the rock and she flipped down near Claire. Claire jabbed hard and struck a glancing blow off Nomura's polished side. When Nomura spun to kick Claire away, Jim leaped and -

Stopped short with his bokken at Nomura's neck. Nomura froze, and Jim let out a triumphant "Ha!"

"I! I did it!" he burst out. Then a thought occurred to him, and he looked down at his vulnerable midsection. His triumph renewed. "You didn't get the chance to put a knife to my ribs or anything!" Another thought occurred to him, and he looked over Nomura's shoulder just in case - " _Or_ at Claire's!"

Near hysterical laughter at actually getting the drop on Nomura with Claire so close in reach bubbled up out of him.

"Okay okay, don't get too full of yourself about it," Nomura said, drawing away from the bokken and rolling her eyes. "It was _one_ time."

Claire ran over to high-five and hug her boyfriend. "Great work!" She crowed, as Jim picked her up one-armed and spun her around with a whoop. Claire shrieked with laughter, and Nomura rolled her eyes harder.

"I wouldn't have been able to do it if you hadn't set me up," Jim told Claire.

"Oh, you would have gotten there eventually," Claire said.

"Yeah, but getting there with you is so much better," Jim said.

Nomura stifled her nausea. "Oh yeah, _that's_ why I hate teenagers." Louder, she added, "Go cool your heads until I can stand to look at you again."

She stalked off as Jim and Claire laughed and twirled some more.

"What do you think, post-training bath time?" Jim proposed, nodding at the nearby stream.

"Oh, definitely," said Claire, who'd long since accepted that some measure of funk was inevitable, when she only saw a coin laundry maybe once a month anymore, but never turned down the chance at a riverside scrubdown.

At the river, she wetted down a washcloth and reached under her shirt to get at her pits, hoping that the next small town they wandered nearby would be soon, so she could buy more wet wipes and deodorant. Jim took off his shirt and dumped a bucket over his upper body, leaning forwards to avoid dripping water on his pants. When he stood up straight, water trickling down his rippling abs, he saw Claire staring at him, wide-eyed.

"What?"

"Nothing," said Claire. Then she looked at her bucket. She looked back at Jim and handed him her bucket. "You look like you need more water."

Nomura, a bit away from the lovebirds at the edge of camp, rolled her eyes. Ugh, humans, always with the sweating and googly eyes. They were so strangely gentle with each other when they had their stirrings.

Gross.

Beside her, Not-Enrique relaxed atop a decomposing, fallen redwood, pulling grubs out of the soft wood and popping them in his mouth like grapes. "Sis has got game, but that's no surprise," he remarked. "Runs in the family."

"You're not actually related you know," said Nomura, arching an eyebrow and looking back to see Claire handing Jim yet another bucket.

Jim, sounding confused, said "Uh, Claire, I think I'm pretty clean now?"

"We're related in spirit!" said Not-Enrique. "I'm surprised you ain't realized you're related in spirit by now, too."

"I'm a replacement for Draal," Nomura said, shortly. She knew she meant more to them, especially Little Gynt, but saying it was another story. "That's all."

"Nah, they've adopted you but good. It's not just Jim and the fat one, Claire's taken a shine to you, too. Humans are good like that." He paused between grubs, briefly. "It's funny when you think about it, innit?"

"What's so funny about it?"

"Well, we spent all that time pretending to be like them to fit in, yeah? But some of 'em accepted us best after they knew we weren't human at all."

"The humans may accept you, but we don't, Impure," said a voice behind them.

They turned. Lurth, a troll, stood behind them with his arms crossed. Lurth was short, but as broad-shouldered as a table, the same color as rippling orange sandstone. His long horns curled up into points. Despite his height, he cut a striking figure, and never had trouble being heard with his deep and strangely sonorous voice. He was well-respected by his peers, due to his brutal nature and strength of will.

As well respected by those peers as Not-Enrique and Nomura _weren't_. He stood surrounded by those peers, a handful of trolls regarding the Changelings with shared coldness.

"I heard it said that Changelings, for all their flaws, were at least perceptive," said Lurth. "How is you haven't realized you've worn out your welcome yet?"

Both Changelings rolled their eyes.

Not-Enrique inspected his talons casually. "Seems to me our welcome ought to be pretty extensive seeing as we helped you fight against Gunmar when we didn't have to."

"You only did it to save your own hides," Lurth accused. "You knew Gunmar would have no more use for infiltrators if his plans to destroy the surface for humans had succeeded. So now you curry favor with the humans, infiltrate troll society, and expect us to believe you won't betray us whenever it serves you."

"You say that like you've got anything worth betraying you for," said Nomura scathingly, a hand on her hip. "Don't assume you'll ever be anything more than useless to us."

Lurth bristled. Not-Enrique held up a small fist for a fist bump. Without looking in his direction, Nomura indulged in rare fashion and actually fistbumped him back.

"Enjoy it while you can," Lurth seethed. "It's bad enough the Trollhunter still has human blood running through his veins, but at least he's become more like us now. And the presence of his human tagalongs has always been … irritating, but _they've_ never stood against us. You, on the other hand, stood with Gunmar and aren't pure troll, the worst of both worlds. You've taken up the worst qualities of humans after being around them so long, and you'll never be able to lose that taint. You won't last here long."

Nomura refused to allow herself to be riled. In the Changeling way of life, giving instigators the reaction they wanted could sometimes be tantamount to suicide. Some, like Draal, had been able to dig deep enough to drive her to rage, but this walking step stool _would not_.

Not-Enrique, however, drew up to all fours, bristling. "'Ey! I'll have you know I consider meself the very worst of trollkind, too."

Nomura looked away from Lurth, into the darkening woods. "I don't know why I waste my time here."

"You're not wasting your time, Nomura," said a gentle voice behind her.

The group of trolls jumped. They turned, suddenly looking like children caught with their hands in a cookie jar.

Jim stepped forward to face them.

"How many humans do you know?" he asked Lurth, "to know that she's picked up their worst traits?"

Lurth glowered at Jim, uncowed. "Trollhunter, you have my respect for defeating Gunmar and Bular, and for being the best of both Troll and Humankind. But you are a rarity in both worlds, and yet your kind is capable of cruelties as terrible as Gunmar, and you know it. He sent the Changelings among humans as much to learn _from_ them as he did to bring about their downfall."

"Changelings start as trolls," said Jim, his voice still filled with icy calm. "And right now the last thing we need is -"

He stopped, realizing this talk was needed by more than just this small group.

"No, you know what? Everyone gather round," Jim said, raising his voice to the rest of the trolls. "We all need to hear this, because everything's changed for _all_ of us."

The trolls, muttering curiously, gathered. With all the eyes on him, Jim felt a tremble of stage fright. Rousing speeches had gotten easier with practice to pull out of nowhere, but still, there was always the chance he could get his point marvellously fruited up.

He took a steadying breath. "I know this isn't what you thought you'd be doing, a year ago. I know you probably never thought you'd be on a pilgrimage across the continent, with a half-human Trollhunter, in the company of Changelings, without a heartstone. And I understand that you're scared, and you're stressed, because I lost my home too, when you lost yours."

He let the point stand, let the common ground pull the trolls into his point.

"And some of these changes are nothing but awful, but others - some of these changes are _triumphs_. Changelings were once your children. Gunmar stole them, and forced them to serve out of fear, but Gunmar is gone - and the Changelings who fought him should be judged for choosing to fight and resist him, not for being what they are. Even a few humans have a place at your sides now, so your children should have the same place. Maybe even more so, since they've been under Gunmar's thumb their whole lives, and still chose to fight back against him - instead of just having to fear and resist him for a season, like we did."

He caught Nomura looking at him with a thoughtful, carefully neutral expression, and caught just the slightest nod of her head in acknowledgement of his support.

"The only home we have now is with each other, and it's everyone's home," Jim said, looking at Lurth and his crowd as he emphasized the 'everyone.' "It's time to let go of the things that divide us. Instead, let's hold on to the things that bind us together - our past victories, our future goals, and the respect we've all earned from each other."

The twilight-blue sky darkened, the forest seeming somehow bigger as the darkness filled it.

"The future's too uncertain for us not to take care of each other," Jim pointed out, to the silent crowd of trolls.

"Well said, Master Jim," said Blinky, who gazed at Jim with pride that seemed to deepen all the time. "You all heard our Trollhunter. Take his message to heart! It's only our unity that will allow us to find our new home and build a new life."

The crowd murmured its agreement. Most of Lurth's glowering companions looked bashful now.

"Sorry," one of them said to Nomura and Not-Enrique. "Old habits are … hard to break, but the Trollhunter speaks the truth. When you fought beside us against Gunmar, it was the first time Changelings ever stood with us. While it was but once, perhaps we should try trusting that it will happen again."

The troll walked away, not wanting to create any more awkwardness.

"Thanks, boss," said Not-Enrique to Jim.

"Hmm. I was about two passive-aggressive scoffs from ditching this band of losers," Nomura admitted, casually. "But I guess I can stick around if they keep it to themselves."

Jim waited for her to say anything more, her arms crossed, looking around not meeting his eyes, and eventually she said, "I appreciate the vote of confidence."

"Anytime." Jim said. "And I mean that - if they keep talking to you and Not-Enrique like that, let me know. We really don't have time to waste on that sort of infighting, and I meant every word. You're a great friend and we'd all be worse off if you were gone."

Nomura snorted. "Isn't that the truth," she said, and walked off before Jim could get any more sentimental.

While some of his cronies had gone apologetic, Lurth simply glared. Knowing he would find no more support, he walked away with the rest of the crowd.

Nomura watched him go without letting the suspicion reach her eyes.

 _That_ was possibly going to be trouble.

* * *

Weeks of walking through untouched northern Californian and Oregonian wilderness finally brought the group back in walking distance of tourist traps. Claire took the opportunity to go shopping as frequently as she could, sometimes two days in a row. Jim didn't know she'd been shopping with a mission for something more specific than decent food and the occasional pair of socks until one afternoon, when she joined him in his current temporary cave and eagerly presented a big souvenir-shop bag to him.

"I got you a present," Claire said. "I know t-shirts don't really fit over your horns anymore, but you can't leave Oregon without getting a Bigfoot shirt, so I looked around -"

"But Claire, I didn't get you anything," Jim joked, unfolding the giant Hawaiian shirt, printed with images of a sasquatch beating up other apex predators. "Wow, look at this! He's wrestling a shark! I've never wrestled a shark."

"Who knows what the future holds?" Claire laughed. "Put it on! I want to make sure the size is all right. They didn't have triple-XL, but I figured double might do."

"Now everybody will know I'm a cryptid," Jim joked, unzipping his sweater so he could put the shirt on, and Claire could appreciate how a double-XL hugged his biceps. "Wow, these buttons are tiny -"

"I can help. It's not quite tying your tie, but -"

Jim grinned, a little heartstruck. "Still nice," he said, as Claire buttoned up the shirt for him. "Thanks, Claire."

He put his hand on her arm as she finished the last button, and she rested her hand on his shoulder for a moment. But as much as she could have happily gone on staring into her smiling boyfriend's eyes, her stomach growled loudly.

She pulled her fast food bag out of her backpack and curled up against Jim. "Too bad cryptids don't also eat DQ," she said, scarfing a chicken finger. Her appetite had been small before, even back when she'd been training in Arcadia, but now that she walked everywhere all day and half the night, carrying everything she owned on her back, it seemed like she could eat any and everything without stopping. The large peanut butter cup blizzard she'd demolished before it could melt had put a dent in her appetite, but still, she didn't see a single fry escaping her within the next hour. "I'm sorry you can't have any," she added, eyeing Jim as she wiped her hands on a napkin and put the soiled napkin in the empty chicken finger box.

Jim picked up the greasy, salty cardboard container. "Is it weird that it still smells kind of good?" he asked, sniffing the container. "The chicken fingers kinda look like they'd taste like cardboard and sadness, but the actual cardboard, uh -"

He eyed Claire, the greasy container still under his nose.

Claire surmised what he was possibly thinking of attempting. "I'm not here to judge," she said, as Jim, blushing slightly but with an 'oh well' sort of expression, bit off a chunk of the cardboard.

He chewed thoughtfully. "Uh," he said. "I hate that this...isn't half bad." He looked at Claire again. "Are you _sure_ you're not gonna judge me if I eat the rest -"

"You can even have the bag when I'm done," Claire said, smiling sympathetically. "At least now I can bring you _something_ to eat."

"I mean really, it should be worse," Jim said, polishing off the chicken finger box and accepting her damp blizzard cup. "But the grease and salt and flavor are, like, just enough seasoning. Imagine if you just ate a big spoonful of oregano, right? That wouldn't taste great. But as a seasoning -"

"I promise, you can have all my fast food wrappers if they taste good to you," Claire said, arching an eyebrow. "And I'll even still kiss you after you eat them."

Jim chuckled a little and looked slightly bashful. Claire loved being able to make him do that.

* * *

Outside Coos Bay Oregon, in the hotly contested land of Elliot State Forest, a lodge stood in the deep woods. It could only be found by taking just the right turns down twisting logging roads and finding the exact right tree at the exact right spot. The tree, a grandmother tree, was too thick for three adults to circle their arms around, and its gnarled fingers reached for the sky. One had to drive past the tree three times in a row, singing a specific folk song, before an unpaved gravel road appeared in place of the tree on the fourth pass

Or at least, that was how it used to be. Now, the grandmother tree was always gone, the road was always there, and what lay down that road was never hidden.

When the police finally found the lodge, they pronounced it illegally built. They would've given a citation for it, if the owner was left alive. But seeing as that wasn't the case...

The huntress walked slowly up the long-neglected path, stepping over stones blanketed with green moss, past ferns with fronds the size of her arm. The air was cool and moist like she remembered. She drank in the smell of wet earth and fir trees.

Police tape lay tangled in the dirt and shriveled shrubs. She stepped gingerly over the tape and through the shattered remains of the front doorway. The fallen door itself lay on the soot-covered hardwood floor, gouged with claw marks, cracked like it had been kicked in two

A gas leak, the police had said. Even though the door had been knocked in, not blown out. He must have made a mistake with the fuel tank, they said. He must not have known how to manage that. But that was impossible.

The elements had nearly take the remains over. Dew condensed in a glossy layer on every surface during the night, and rain poured throughout the day through the gaping holes in the roof. Mold spread everywhere through the house, lancing through the floors and the walls like a disease.

The huntress knew that mold could grow in a wet house as fast as 24 to 48 hours, even though she'd never looked up that fact for herself.

What had once been a place of laughter and excitement was melting in the misty forest into a lump of ash and rot.

She passed by the kitchen. For a moment she could picture wrinkled hands cutting up cheese and parading animal crackers across the table. The fingerprints of those wrinkled hands were hidden under the condensation and mold throughout every part of the lodge. They were on the burnt tapestries that she passed in the halls (Atlantean). They were on the ceramic masks on the walls, shattered from the heat (glamour masks, inactive, Venetian). They were on the burnt pictures that lay in shattered glass frames on the floors, showing a range of images in the glimpses between burnt patches. The backdrop of each photo differed wildly, but certain figures were almost always present: three men and one woman, in a range of fashions that stopped changing after the 70's.

Their presence was as much a part of the house as the walls. The furniture patterns that also hadn't changed since the seventies, the burnt and melted husk of a TV that was older than the huntress, the wall-mounted singing fish, dead and melted on the wall, made it seem no one had lived in the house since that collection of old people.

Only the first study showed touches of someone else. The outer shell of a telescope. A scorched metal table with a melted microscope, cracked slides, shattered glass tubes with dried out gunk in shades of blue and neon yellow. A terrarium with shriveled brown plants, leaves curled in alien shapes. A bulletin board with burnt remnants of string, pictures, notes, and half-melted thumbtacks. The charred frame of a cot. Shelves of nerd books, now just mounds of char and tatters, only the occasional leatherbound cover visible on the floor, with titles like "The Kingdom Fungi: The Biology of Mushrooms, Molds, and Lichens" and "Lumberjack Folklore of the Pacific Northwest."

Not the important books, though, she'd noticed. None of the covers of the _special_ books were here.

It all fit. The lack of the _special_ books, the message, the accident, the dreams, the reward.

And the vast basement that lay empty.

She stopped at the end of the downstairs hallway, looking into the living room. Unlike the rest of the house, it was fully burnt, no personal remains left in fragments. The gas tank explosion had blown off the back wall and most of the ceiling, shattered and melted the windows.

Only the various enchantments on the house had kept it from burning down entirely, but they hadn't been enough to preserve this room.

The huntress remembered where the little police placards had been placed on the floor, that she'd seen when she'd forced her way past the police to the crime scene. They'd been placed like placecards at a very morbid dinner party, around…

The police had decided it was his remains, but she could only think of the pulverized, charred, scattered organic mass as some unknown _it_.

 _("- teeth were too damaged by the heat and force of the explosion to identify by dental records. The DNA test was inconclusive, but our forensic anthropologist think the bones match someone of his age and stature. I'm sorry, I know you don't want to hear this, but if he was the only one living in the home, it's unlikely that anyone else -")_

She had no way of explaining everyone's wrongness to them, but then, the two of them had never been able to explain their particular oddness to anyone else. Only three people had understood, had _believed_ them.

She turned around a familiar corner, and walked up the metal spiral staircase, blackened with soot and slightly bent. In her mind's eye, she saw two small forms laughing as they skidded down it together crammed together in a plastic storage tote they were using as a sled. When she reached the third floor and the door just beyond the staircase, she pressed her fingertips against the crude gouges of their names.

 _("We didn't mean to break it." "Ah, it's okay if you little gremlins put your names on it. The room's yours, ain't it? As long as you want it to be yours.")_

She pushed past the door to the small room beyond, where a bed sat on each side. One side of the room was bright purple, with a mural of a tree in psychedelic colors surrounded by hearts and stars. The other half of the room was painted over dark blue, a mural of branching trees and forest creatures, antlered deer and owls and frogs.

The place where a fox had once been painted had been gouged off the wall with something sharp. He'd been in a _mood_ that day, after it all was over. He'd wanted the reminder to go away forever.

The room hadn't burned up, but the moisture of the environment had taken its toll. The posters of boy bands and sci fi shows were glossy with black slime. The stuffed animals on the bed stank of mildew.

But this stuff was all old, little things left behind the way things got left in one home when you had a second one to go back to. It was surprising only that the room had been left perfectly preserved - except, when she thought about it, that wasn't surprising at all.

They hadn't changed much in the room over the years. Different toys, different posters, different books, different board games, but that was just surface. There still were always toys, posters, board games, and books in general. The murals stayed the same, and so had the fairy lights strung on one side of the room and the glow-in-the-dark stars and mobile of the planets stuck on the sloping blue ceiling of the other side.

They'd left it the way it was back when the world still made sense. Back when the world was exciting instead of terrifying.

Something chirped and rustled in the corner of the room. The huntress's heart leaped up in her throat. She pulled out a long dagger and took a fighting stance. A creature jumped out of the shadows, and she shrieked.

In joy.

"Mr. Snufflebutter, you're alive!"

The brightly colored squirrel-like creature was a blur of batwings and bushy tail and far too many eyes (or just enough eyes, if you thought about it that way). It flew to her shoulder and cuddled close to her face.

"I thought you were dead!" Tears trickled down her face as she cuddled the weird abomination to her cheek. "I thought -" She didn't finish her thoughts because it was better not to think them. "I'm so glad you're okay! What happened here? The day the lodge blew up. Can you show me?"

The creature nuzzled her moist face and chittered a noise of agreement. Its many eyes glowed purple. For a moment, the woman rocked in place, her eyes glowing as well, as the creature wrapped itself in her curly white hair.

She let out a gasp.

"It all makes sense now! I mean, parts of it at least."

She sat down hard on the moldy purple bedspread, trying not to sneeze at the mold it kicked up. She closed her eyes and sat still for a little while. She needed to _think_.

While she sat quietly, surrounded by the past, laughter echoed from far off. Screams, too. In the sunny summer days of her memories, they went hand in hand, blending together in an endless symphony, just slightly off-key.

"It was supposed to be over, Mr. Snufflebutter. I told him over and over that he was being pants-on-head crazyface."

History wasn't supposed to be so fragile that something like that day could echo. But it had.

 _("Don't you see? What happened in Arcadia Oaks, It's just like what happened in Coos Bay - something big and weird and **wrong** , with everyone trying to delude themselves into thinking it never happened. But this time something else caused another event and someone else stopped it. I'm trying to find out who it was, because if I'm right -")_

He _was_ right.

 _(" - it's going to happen again. And the ones who saved Arcadia might be the only ones that can stop what's coming.")_

The woman clutched her head in her hands.

"It doesn't matter! I can't worry about the big picture stuff! I'm bad at the big picture stuff! I have to just do the job. Then somebody else can worry about the big picture stuff, someone who's good at it. You agree with me, right Mr. Snufflebutter?"

Mr. Snufflebutter looked at her skeptically and she sighed.

"Yeah, I wouldn't agree with me, either."

But sometimes all a person could do was take the path of least resistance. She was good at finding the slippery little slopes that lead away from a problem. That was all she could do now, Slip N' Slide away from the problem as fast as she could - and take her reward with her.

* * *

A lot of the little gift shops in the tourist traps along their journey had food supplies for campers passing through, like little general stores. Claire never had much trouble finding food to resupply with - the trick was finding things that were actually in date.

Claire looked at the expiration date on a jar of peanut butter, saw that it was a blast not only from the past, but from the _last decade_ , and put it back.

"I'm sick of peanut butter anyway," she said to herself, because she was. _So_ sick of it. But Dairy Queens weren't available between towns, so she had to find something she could tolerate on another week or so through the wilderness.

Something that wasn't peanut butter, or protein bars, or trail mix, or tuna...

Her face brightened when she found a box of salsa in packets and tortillas that weren't expired. Maybe she could combine them with tuna and make something that was kind of almost like actual tacos? No, wait - there was a whole rack of jerky, from expensive artisan locally-made stuff to flavor after flavor of supermarket nuggets. She dug eagerly in, looking for the best combination of cheap and recently made. This was turning out to be a successful shopping trip after all. After she was done here, she could - she was going to -

She froze in the aisle, looking at a shelf filled with badly made figurines of bigfoot, two for five dollars.

After this, she didn't really have anything to do. She could walk through town. But she didn't really have any money to spend in town, or anyone to meet in town, or anything to do but then turn around and...walk some more, back to camp, and dinner. Then tomorrow, more of the same: walking, endless walking.

The places they walked through were beautiful. Rolling hills with sunshine through enormous redwoods or mist that cooled her forehead, but - Claire was struck as she really, really thought about all the walking she'd done, and all the walking she had yet to do. Sometimes the terrain was so complex that all she could do was watch her feet as she trudged, nursing the next blister, avoiding each misstep, too absorbed in her sore feet and challenging path even to appreciate the beauty she walked through.

And when she was done with the day's walk, there was never anything coming up except training, and more walking. No homework assignment or after-school practice or trollhunting mission or girls' night or upcoming play. Her life was repetitive - but not regimented anymore.

That thought was strangely horrifying. Repetition was familiar to her - but not for just one, long, unstructured thing. Her life was practice practice practice, assignment after assignment, and nothing less than reasonably-close-to perfection had impressed her mother.

There was nothing to perfect anymore, other than her staff training with Nomura. And that had no final date, no deadline, no one to impress with it. After all, the person whose opinion she cared about the most always looked at her with stars in his eyes.

Claire's heart clenched in her chest as she stood motionless, staring at cheap souvenirs, having a mini mid-life crisis at age 16 in a tourist trap.

* * *

But she didn't tell Jim about any of it when she came back, so he was untroubled as he jogged through the forest later that night. Claire was asleep, the trolls were foraging deep in the woods, and he had nothing to do for a little while.

With no movies, books, homework, or kitchen to cook in he really had nothing to do for a little while.

So he went wandering, as he tended to do when Claire was asleep and he had no fights to break up. The silent forest was a fresh and inviting backdrop for his thoughts.

Mist collected in the redwoods and dripped from the branches, falling in a very sparse kind of rain. Sometimes when he stood with his face turned up, the drops landed on his face, cool and comforting. When he leaped from tree to tree, they shed their raindrops in torrents, pattering across the forest floor.

The novelty of running through the cool mist without ever quite getting cold or tired was fun like he hadn't had in a while. So was the novelty of being able to run through the night without worrying, about being seen, about being attacked -

Jim relaxed into the calm, into bounding through the dark trees just for the enjoyment of it, descending into the flow of fun he hadn't accessed for a long time -

The problem with just having fun, though, was that he wasn't looking where he was going. And where he was going turned out to be towards a campsite.

Jim saw the firelight long before he tackled a tree close to it. He hung from the tree branch, twisting slightly in the breeze, looking at the firelight as the distant sound of laughter reached his ears.

 _I wonder what they're laughing about, he thought_ , picturing the campsite full of people he'd never talked to before. He itched to know the answer. He laughed plenty with Claire and Blinky and the other trolls, and with his mom and Toby when they talked on the phone, but -

But he was never going to laugh with anyone but them, probably ever again. That was the most deeply isolating feeling, because he'd never known that it was a freedom he could lose. The freedom of unexpected meetings, new friends, had been a guarantee in his human life.

It was extremely likely he'd never make a new friend now. Not a human friend, anyway.

More laughter drifted from the campfire. Jim knew the right thing to do would be to go on his way, but...

...but it might be a good idea to see if he could figure out where this group was going to help the trolls avoid running across them.

Jim crept closer slowly, quietly. When he reached a tree at the edge of the firelight, he climbed to a branch well above the height the campers were likely to look.

The dozen or so people crowded around the campfire looked like two families, five adults and a pack of children who looked related, with a pair of kids who must have been friends of the siblings along for the trip. The youngest kid was rambling in a way vaguely like storytelling about an alligator on a quest to rescue his crocodile friend. The nearest adults nodded along while the rest of the kids' attentions slowly unravelled. The 8-year-old took another minute to detail the sandwich the alligator made to provision himself on his quest before the woman sitting next to him cut in.

"That's a great story Jorgen, but how about we finish it later? I think someone else wants to tell a story before bed."

"But Mommy -"

"We'll write it down in the tent later, okay sweetie?" Mom promised. "Then you can share the whole thing with everyone." She paused. "No matter how long it is."

"Yeah, I've got a story to tell," one of the adults chimed in. "It starts when two teens decided to take a drive to the abandoned house at the edge of town -"

"Not you, Marco," Mom cut in. "Last time you told a scary story I had to fit three children in a one-Mom sleeping bag. Nobody did _any_ sleeping."

"Oh come on, it's not _that_ scary."

"I've got a funny story to tell," suggested one of the younger women, a girl who looked like she might be an eldest sister home from college. "It's safe for kids, I swear." A pause. "Mostly."

She launched into it before any of the adults could protest.

"Okay, so a teacher gave her fifth grade class an assignment. 'Class,' she said, 'I want each of you to go home and find a story that has a moral and bring it back to class tomorrow. It can be something that happened to you or a story you heard about, but it has to be something that really happened.' So the kids went home and found their stories and came back to the next day. It was a farming town, so most of the stories had morals like 'Don't put all your eggs in one basket' or 'don't count your chickens before they're hatched.' But then Little Jimmy had to tell his story."

Jim perked up on his branch a little.

"Little Jimmy said, 'My daddy told me a story about my Aunt Sally. Aunt Sally was a pilot in a war and her plane got hit. She had to bail out over enemy territory and all she had was a small flask of whiskey, a pistol, and a survival knife. She drank the whiskey on the way down so it wouldn't fall into enemy hands and then her parachute landed right in the middle of twenty enemy troops. She shot fifteen of them with the gun until she ran out of bullets, killed four more with the knife, 'til the blade broke, and then she killed the last one with her _bare hands_."

The woman telling the story looked at the group with maniacal eyes for a moment.

"'Good heavens,' said the horrified teacher, "What kind of moral did you learn from that horrible story?' And Little Jimmy said,'" The young woman took on a wide-eyed expression of faux terror. "'The moral is: _Don't piss off Aunt Sally when she's been drinking_."

The adults in the group laughed and the kids old enough to get the joke giggled. But they all went quiet when they heard the "ha!" that came from above them, in a voice none of them knew.

Jim, horrified by his outburst, clapped a hand to his mouth hoping they hadn't heard. But they all looked upward. A flashlight beamed directly into his eyes.

All twelve people screamed.

"Wait! Wait, I'm not going to hurt you -" Jim protested, squinting against the blinding flashlight, but a gunshot deafened him too and he felt a sting -

He'd been shot. He'd been _shot_. He dropped out of the tree with pain radiating over his face. Blood ran down his face and neck.

"What is that?" Someone screamed as he landed, popped up, and heard the cocking of a rifle. Another gunshot rattled Jim's hearing, overpowering the children's screams. Pain shot through his lower stomach, radiating throughout his torso, stealing his breath away.

He bolted into the dark woods, stumbling over the brush. The screams of the campers and the light of the fire faded, but his heart beat so fast that all he could think to do was keep running, all he wanted to do was put distance, distance, distance between himself and the humans -

When he'd run his adrenaline out, he was miles from the human camp. Miles from the troll camp. But it had taken that long for his heartbeat to slow down and for his instincts to do anything but scream at him to get away, because he was injured -

Wait, how injured was he? Jim's heartbeat ratcheted up again as he realized the calm might just be from blood loss -

He fumbled with his bigfoot shirt, damp with something thicker and slimier than sweat. He pulled up the hem and felt around the pain in his torso, until his fingers found -

A hole, a gaping hole at the center of the pain, pouring blood all over his hand and all over the nice new shirt Claire had just bought him. Cold fear and despair filled him. He was going to die of blood loss, so far from the trolls, he was going to die -

All those dangers he'd faced, all those enemies who'd ever tried to kill him, and it was some Oregonian with a hunting rifle protecting their family when he wasn't even a threat that killed him.

The irony wasn't funny. Jim stumbled east, in the vague direction of the troll camp, shouting for help as warm blood coursed down his leg and the pain slowly faded into numb shock.

* * *

"Claire, wake up. Claire -"

Claire shot up in her sleeping bag, the whole tree her lean-too was constructed against shaking as Blinky knocked on it.

"What?" she asked, still muzzy with sleep, unable to see Blinky in the dark.

"No time to explain, and even if there were, I don't know what's wrong _yet_ ," Blinky said. "But Master Jim -"

Claire heard a familiar shout in the distance - and scrambled out of her sleeping bag, flicking on the headlamp she slept with and shoving her feet into her hiking boots.

"Let's go!" she shouted, nearly tearing down her shelter in her hurry to get out and join the trolls, running towards Jim's distant shout.

Claire followed Blinky through the woods, Jim's shouts getting closer but never any less desperate, until somewhere in the dark -

"I got him!" Nomura's shout came from near enough that Claire could hear them breaking the branches as they approached. She followed Blinky over a fallen tree and saw Nomura with Jim's arm over her shoulder, blood soaking the bottom half of the shirt she'd just bought him.

Claire gasped, her heart feeling suddenly squeezed by a clawed hand.

"They shot me," Jim said, sounding suddenly...well, _wounded_. "I can't believe they _shot_ me -"

"Lay him down!" Blinky instructed. "Take off his shirt so I can look at the wound. You two, bring the lanterns closer! And you, get the first aid bag from my belongings! It's red with a white cross on it."

Nomura ripped the buttons on the shirt to expose Jim's torso. Claire realized with a jolt that what she'd been hoping for wasn't reality: it wasn't a graze. There was a hole just below and to the left of his navel - an actual hole, weeping blood.

"Sorry," Jim muttered, as Claire ran over and put her hand in his. "I - uh - ruined your nice shirt. Already."

He tried to smile at her, and the attempt made Claire's heart hurt.

"You, please, lift his feet up," she said, pointing at a yellow troll with one forehead horn. "Just about this high, okay? I'll get Dr. Lake on video chat so she can help us." She frantically pulled out her phone and dialed.

"Nomura, use the shirt to place pressure on the wound," said Blinky, accepting the duffel-sized first aid bag when it was handed to him. "Great grumbly gruesome, I've read about the effects of these 'guns' but we've been fortunate to avoid humans enough to preclude facing such weapons."

Nomura pressed the crumpled shreds of bigfoot shirt against Jim's wound. Jim's hand whipped out frantically to hold onto something and Claire grabbed onto it. His hand tightened around Claire's, but even in pain he managed to take enough care not to crush her hand.

Claire wanted to stroke his face with her free hand, but that hand was busy calling Barbara. "Please pick up, please pick up," she murmured, as Barbara's phone rang -

Finally Barbara responded, opening up the video chat. Claire launched into her explanation before Barbara had a chance to say hi.

"Dr. Lake!" she exclaimed. "Jim's been shot, in his lower left torso -"

"Shot?! How did he - who shot - oh my god -" said Barbara, cycling through several phases of parental terror before she reached an impressive state of medical calm. "Claire move the phone closer. The rest of you, I need all the light you can give me."

More trolls rushed over with glowing crystal lanterns. Claire aimed her headlamp at the wound and held her phone over it as Nomura pulled the impromptu bandage away. "Can you see it?"

"Hold it there," Barara instructed, and Claire did. "Steady, Claire."

She wasn't sure where she found the calm, but it was there somehow - or maybe Barbara's voice put it there - and Claire managed to hold her hand still.

"Mr. Blinky, there's saline solution in a large plastic bottle. Pour it on the wound to flush the blood so I can see the the damage."

"Yes. Ah, here it is." Blinky's many hands made short work of ripping away the plastic seal and cracking open the bottle. He poured it on the wound. Jim let out a snarl of pain that turned into a sob.

"I know it hurts, sweetie, but I need to look."

In tense silence, Blinky poured the solution and cleaned out the wound. Barbara let out a sigh of relief.

"Oh thank God. Mr. Blinky, it looks like the bullet got caught in his adipose tissue."

Blinky and Claire sighed in relief.

"Wossat mean, doc?" asked Not-Enrique from his perch on a larger troll, unable to hide his concern. "Spell it out for the less squishy among us."

"It means it didn't go past the hypodermis and stopped short of his muscles. There's minimal muscle damage and it didn't go deep enough to hit his organs" Barbara collapsed back against the frame of her bed.

The group collectively sighed in relief.

"I know where this is going," said Jim weakly. "Toby will be insufferable. The jokes about abs of steel are never going to stop."

"But there's so much blood," Claire said anxiously.

"People underestimate how much blood the body can hold. Minor injuries can bleed a lot without serious problems," said Barbara. "With Jim's size, especially, he has a lot more in reserve. Mr. Blinky, you still need to remove the bullet fragments. If they were further into the abdominal; cavity, in most cases it would be better to leave them, but bullets that are right under the skin can be removed safely and it will help the tissue heal faster to have the foreign body is out of the way. And I don't like the idea of leaving it in when we don't know how Jim's physiology will react to heavy metals or if his immune system will go overboard trying to get it out..."

"Understood, Barbara. I assume we'll need wound dressings, medical tape, more irrigation fluid, and perhaps those forceps for this?"

"That should be enough," said Barbara, pushing a hand through her messy hair and taking a steadying breath as she considered what needed to be done next.

"Mom, are you sure it - that it'll be okay? It hurts really bad," gasped Jim, unafraid of...well, being afraid, and letting everyone see it.

"I know it hurts, sweetie, but it probably feels worse than it is because this is all recently healed tissue. I think you're a lot more durable than you used to be."

"Morgana _did_ leave a big bruise there," Claire pointed out, squeezing Jim's hand.

Strangely, that was a relief to her, to know that Jim could take a gunshot that direct to a part of his body already wounded and come away from it with no long term damage, but being relieved that being shot hadn't killed her boyfriend took a backseat to being horrified that he'd been shot at all.

"Mr. Blinky, take one of the wound dressings and put pressure back on his stomach, let's try to get the bleeding down before we even consider taking the bullet out. I want to take a look at that face wound anyway. It looks superficial, but we should make sure. I'll need you to irrigate it just like we did with the stomach wound. "

The face wound turned out to be just a graze, though it had come close to taking a bite out of his cheek bone. That one took even longer to stop bleeding than the stomach wound, but in the end, pressure and bandages were enough, and they got to avoid the unpleasant task of Barbara talking Blinky through putting in stitches.

As for the stomach wound, Barbara talked Blinky through picking out a warped metal slug and bits of shrapnel piece by piece. Jim didn't cry out as he worked. In fact, other than the odd involuntary snarl, he barely made any noise at all. But the silence was somehow worse. He held himself so tense and still, muscles straining, tears streaming from eyes clenched shut so tight he looked like he'd blinded himself staring directly into the sun.

Claire held her phone up as Barbara talked calmly through the process, and held Jim's hand in her free one. Not once did he squeeze too tight, but she saw the deep grooves in the soil opposite her where he dug his other hand into the earth.

The trolls rose to the occasion when it came to tending to their Trollhunter and his squishy insides. They helped Blinky bandage him, took off his bloody clothes, gathered water and bathed him, clothed him with clean clothes. Claire gave Jim his privacy during the redressing, but returned to hold his hand when that part was done. It was somehow less awkward than it could've been. Trolls had a lax view on nudity, and all that mattered to them was that their Trollhunter needed to be cared for.

When Jim was as tended as he could be, Claire left him with her phone to talk to his mother, and walked a little distance away to stand next to Blinky.

"We'll stay here longer to allow Jim some time to heal," he said, as Claire stopped beside him, staring into space. "We can post trolls on watch for any human intrusion - but chances are they won't come looking for us."

"Are you sure? This is big sasquatch hunting country," Claire said, thinking of the ads for forest tours and roadside museums she'd seen in town since they'd reached northern California.

"That will take time," Blinky assured her. "Most humans who see us are too afraid to seek out confirmation of our existence. You, my dear, were quite the inquisitive exception."

Claire gave Blinky a thin smile but the smile dropped quickly. She heard Jim rustling around in the grass, and saw the shadow of him getting up and wandering off into the woods - no doubt for a good old-fashioned brood.

Claire marked his path, intending to follow him. "Blinky, he's going to be okay, right?"

As close as she and Jim were, he and Blinky had been close a little longer.

"I couldn't begin to understand what Jim has lost," Blinky admitted. "The life of a troll is so rigid and enclosed compared to the life of a human. Most trolls meet everyone that they will ever know from their community in the very first year of life and rarely do our communities intermingle. To have the human world open to you and suddenly have it taken away, to live with the knowledge that any new people you meet might recoil in fear...that's a grievous hurt."

He looked sidelong at Claire.

"I believe you can imagine what he's going through better than I," he prompted, and Claire nodded.

"I don't know what to say, but I'll try," she said.

She followed the sound of Jim's progress through the trees. When she caught up to him, he'd found a cliff to sit on, and was looking over the forest silvered with light underneath an almost-full moon.

"Jim," she said, reaching out for his shoulder, afraid for a moment he'd pull away.

He didn't, and let her rest her hand on his shoulder. She crouched down beside him.

"How's the pain?" she asked, fishing for good words to say.

"Painful," Jim said, lightly. "But hey, I'm not dead. So that's something. And I guess I'm partly bulletproof."

Still, the sadness in his voice was so heavy, Claire's own heart hurt. She squeezed her free hand, remembering the weight of the Shadowstaff in it, and wished she still had that power - had _something_ that she could do to protect Jim a little better than just hitting things with sticks.

But having a magic staff wouldn't have helped in this situation anyway. She hadn't even been there. There would always be things that happened to him when she wasn't around, no matter if she had the ability to do anything about them or not -

"Those people would be horrified at what they've done if they knew you," she insisted. "They only shot you because they didn't know any better. But if they did, Jim -"

"I know they might treat me better if they knew me," Jim said, surprising Claire with the force of his frustration. "That's the worst part."

"What do you mean?"

"Those people that shot me," Jim said, finally, breaking down to the heart of what hurt him. "Claire, they were _nice people_. They were just...a bunch of friends, camping with their kids, telling funny stories. It's not like they were, I don't know, Bigfoot hunters or - or whacked-out government agents or something, they were just friends hanging out with their families in the woods. They saw me because I laughed at one of their stories - and we're never going to have that because when nice people see me they _grab their weapons_."

"They were startled," Claire countered. "They just didn't know you -"

"They never will, will they?" Jim asked, his voice breaking. There was no anger in his voice, just resignation - and sadness. "There are so many people who I _could_ meet but I never will, because I'm not someone who _can_ meet them anymore." He exhaled. "That's what hurts. Even more than the bullet wound." He paused. "Though the bullet wound hurts a lot, too."

Claire had nothing comforting to say to that. It was true. It was too true and it hurt her heart to admit that it was.

"Jim," she said, putting her hand on his arm. "I'm sorry."

She wanted to tell him that he _would_ make new friends, that even if he couldn't go and make new social ties, she would probably meet people they could trust in time -

But Jim's shoulders hunched, and he wiped the first round of tears from his eyes, and Claire knew that he didn't want to have to burden her with living part of his life for him. She knew that he had lost a freedom that it would always hurt to have lost.

Just as she was facing down a changed life, a life without things she'd expected, with new challenges she hadn't - he was facing more of that. And always would. No matter what she said. Or how close she stood by him.

She leaned against his arm and put her arms around him as he cried, sitting with Jim and his grief. There wasn't much else to do. He'd lost something real and nothing anyone had to say could change that.

* * *

Blinky watched from a distance as Jim sobbed on Claire's shoulder. Nomura stood next to him with an expression that actually betrayed concern.

"For once I feel vexingly speechless. What can I say to comfort him, when even other humans can't find the right words? When I couldn't begin to understand such a heartache? He knows that he has a home among us, but I could remind him of it ten thousand times over and it still wouldn't erase the loss of the home he left behind."

"I've always been terrible at dealing with them when they're like this," said Nomura, "but one thing I've learned from living among humans is that sometimes there are no magic words that can comfort them. Sometimes all you can do is acknowledge that something's rough."

"Yes," Blinky agreed. "I suppose that's all one can do."

And so he did it. He walked over and took his place at Jim's other side near the cliff's edge.

"Master Jim, I know there's nothing I can say that offer instant relief, so all I will say is that you are ever so loved, and that I'm very sorry."

Jim turned to Blinky, his face moist, and still clinging slightly to Claire, he leaned into Blinky's arms. Blinky engulfed him and Claire warmly.

Not-Enrique joined them, hopping onto Claire's shoulder. Nomura joined them as well, not clustering in, but taking a seat on the cliff.

They all said nothing because there was nothing they could say. But at least when the tide of grief finally stemmed, perhaps their presence would help fill the empty space left behind.

* * *

A ridge over, concealed in shadow, the huntress closed her spyglass and tucked away her spying artifact and clutched the camo over her heart with her hand.

"Mr. Snufflebutter, this is _so_ _sad_ ," she said.

The critter squeaked and chittered in response, and climbed up her arm to swirl around her neck, burrowing in her curly white hair like a living, comforting scarf.

"He doesn't even know not-nice people _are_ hunting him," she said, dragging her hands down her face. "Mr Snufflebutter, _I'm_ the not-nice person."

This admission pained her so much she groaned - quietly - out loud.

She looked over her shoulder at the sasquatch she'd piped into her service with her magic flute. The huge, shaggy humanoid was still staring off into the dark with the awed, dazed blankness that the flute inspired, too out of it to run away or attack her, ready to receive her orders to go and throw its own life away, attacking that nice young man and his friends when he was already so down -

"I'm the _extremely_ not-nice person."

She left the dazed sasquatch to have the spell wear off, knowing the timid creature would be too shy to bother the trolls and humans if it wasn't pushed into it. She made quick time through the woods until she was miles from the the trolls, the sasquatch, the cabin, and any human campsite. There she pulled out her puzzle-box.

 _"Well?"_ the distorted voice came, devoid of emotion as usual.

The huntress sucked air in through her teeth. "Yeah, soooo - no luck on the monster-attack front tonight," she said. "I hit them with a sasquatch when he'd already been injured, and they _still_ took it out, no problem."

 _"Then attack with another,"_ the voice ordered.

"About that," she argued, "I couldn't find any more in the area. This isn't sasquatch season. A lot of them are still up north in British Columbia and my passport is expired, and most critters don't hang out in sasquatch territory even when they're not, you know, right here."

The voice waited for her to go on.

"I just think that maybe you should try something other than attacking them -"

 _"I don't pay you to think,"_ the voice admonished.

"You haven't paid me at all," the hunter snarked, quietly, half to herself, but of course, her employer overheard her.

 _"Keep up this unreliability and I **won't** ,"_ they threatened.

That made her straighten her back a little, sucking in a breath. "I know, I know. I'll - I'll get the job done," she said, with a conviction she didn't feel.

 _"Do it sooner than later. The monsters you tame with your little toy are nothing compared to the ones in the place I gave you a glimpse of. I don't have to tell you how hard it is to fight them. You should know, because of your little gift. You feel it, don't you? The pain - the hunger - the creeping despair."_

She knelt on the forest floor, eyes squeezed shut.

"I know."

 _"I'll leave you with that gentle thought."_

The transmission cut out and the puzzle box closed.

The huntress wiped her eyes with a sleeve.

"I have to do it, Mr. Snufflebutter." The huntress looked back in the direction of the Trollhunters' camp. "Just...not _today_."

She could at least give them that, their time to grieve and comfort the grieving. She knew _he_ would understand why he had to wait just a little longer.

And as she knelt there on the moonlight dappled forest floor, she also hoped he would understand - and forgive - everything else.


End file.
